Abandon All Artichokes Review

GameWright has mastered the ability to launch easy to learn, fun to play board and card game titles that are appropriate for a variety of ages. While often easy to learn, the games take a fair bit of strategic skill to win, and most can be completed within 30 minutes or less. For folks as busy as my wife and I, finding a few spare minutes to play a GameWright game is becoming a daily exercise. Abandon All Artichokes falls into the same mold as other GameWright games, and is an easy recommendation for card game enthusiasts.

How to Play

Each player will be dealt a face down deck of 10 artichoke cards. The goal of the game is to compost (or discard) all of your artichoke cards, so that when you draw a brand new hand, if you have no artichokes in it, you win! It’s an easy concept, but eliminating the artichokes from your and can be harder than you think. A separate deck of cards will have a number of other vegitables in it, that will do a variety of different actions. This deck will be shuffled, and five cards deal to create a Garden Row. On a players turn, they select one card from the Garden Row, and then proceed to play as many cards as possible.

For example, if Player A draws the carrot card from the Garden Row, they can compost (or discard) two artichoke cards and the carrot card they just used. If that player had another vegetable card in their hand – lets say the Onion, which allows players to discard an artichoke card form their hand, and then place the onion on top of their opponents face-up pile – they can play that card as well. Once a player has finished playing all their cards, they put their hand into their own face-up discard pile (which is separate from the communal compost (discard) pile everyone puts cards into) and draw a new hand of 5 cards from their facedown deck.

Once a player has drawn back up to 5 cards (or as many as are in their deck), and their hand has no artichokes, they win!

Strategic, Fast Play

Deciding which cards to take from the Garden Row will be important in deciding who will win the game. Taking a card that is only good once can be beneficial – like discarding two artichokes with the carrot card – but if you choose other cards that you don’t discard but only benefit you once, you are wasting good opportunities to eliminate more artichokes from your hand.

There are other factors that can also have an impact on how you play, including swapping random cards with opponents, or passing a certain number of cards to the left or right. Every hand has the opportunity to alter how you play the game, and I was there for every minute of it, enjoying it immensely.

Ultimately, we had to rope our 11 year old into playing with us because we quickly found that Abandon All Artichokes does not scale well for 2 players. The experience with 3 players was substantially better than the experience with two, and that is how we would recommend you play.

GameWright won’t steer you wrong when it comes to fast paced, easy to play board and card games, and we cannot recommend this one enough!