The Design of Ligretto

I played the card game “Ligretto” with 5 players including myself. The game is very fast-paced, and took roughly 5 to 10 minutes per round. We played each round as a separate game rather than attempting to play rounds until a player reached a score of 100 (as the rules state) due to limited time.

Rules:

Each player has their own coloured deck of cards, which is divided into a “stack” of 10 cards face down, a “row” of 3 cards face up, and a hand made up of the remaining cards in the deck. When the game starts, there are no turns, but all players will play at once. At the beginning, if any player has a 1 in their row, they will place it somewhere in the middle of the table (within reach of all players) to start a new pile. Then, if a player has a 2 of that colour in their row, they must quickly place that card on top of the 1 of the same colour, before another player does the same. If another player beats them, the slower player must take their card back and wait for the next opportunity. When a pile reaches 10, no more cards can be added to it.

If a player does not have any cards they can add to a pile in their row, then they can flip over every third card in their hand (similar to the deck in Solitaire), and if the card flipped over can be added to a pile (or start a new pile, if it is a 1), then the player may do so. However, each player aims to use the cards in their row opposed to their hand – the hand merely acts as backup.

If a player uses a card from their row, they must replace it with a card from their stack until their stack is empty. Once they have no cards left in their stack or row, the player must shout “Ligretto stop!” and the round ends.

Once the round is over, points are added up. Each player must count the number of remaining stack and row cards they have, double it, and those are their penalty points to be taken off of their score. Then, they can count all cards making up the piles in the middle (players will know which cards are theirs because of the colour of the back of the card). Each card the player had added to a pile counts for one point. The player with the highest score wins the round. The first player to reach a score of 100 from multiple rounds wins the game.

What I Liked:

Fast Pace

The game moved so quickly that it built up a lot of frantic excitement for the players. One player moving fast made others want to move fast so they don’t fall behind, and the speed of the game was half the fun.

Cooperation for the Sake of Competition

It was actually really neat that even though this game is highly competitive, players would sometimes work together to achieve a common goal. For instance, if there was a red 2 on a pile in the middle, one player had a red 3 in their row but didn’t notice, and another player has a red 4 that they are waiting to put down, the player with the 4 may tell the player with the 3 that they are free to put the card down, because this would then allow the player with the 4 to put their card down. I noticed a lot of this sort of cooperation going on, and it made the game a bit more interesting, because this meant that players were not only watching their cards and the piles in the middle, but they were also watching opponents’ cards for an opportunity.

The Hand Counts for Something

Until we added up our points at the end of the first round, I’d been afraid that putting down cards from my hand wouldn’t count for anything in the end, even though the vast majority of cards I’d put down were from my hand. However, the way the scoring system is set up, players gain points for all the cards they put in piles in the middle, whether they are from their hand or their row, so it was a relief to see that all those cards weren’t just a waste.

No Turns

Players all play the game at once, which means there is no waiting for anybody to take their turn. This actually caused a great amount of chaos since you have to pay attention to everything going on around you as well as your own cards, but this actually made the game so much fun because it was so crazy.

Game Length

Though the rules state that the game should be replayed until a player reaches a score of 100, players could choose any goal score to make the game as long or short as they like, since each round is typically so short. That means that this game is great for anywhere from a short break activity to a full game night.

What I Disliked:

Flipping 3 Cards from my Hand

Since the game was so fast-paced, having to count out every 3 cards from my hand (the same as in Solitaire) became very tedious, and it felt like I was wasting the most time doing this. Since I felt so rushed, sometimes I would miscount, which would waste even more time if I had to count again. Though counting out 3 cards is a simple task, it becomes irritating under pressure when time is limited.

Needs an Appropriate Seating Setup

When we played the game, we played on a long desk, which seemed to be fine at first, but once we really got playing with all the different piles in the middle, it was often difficult for a player at one end of the desk to reach a pile of cards at the other end. In order to play this game with as little frustration as possible, players would need to find a more appropriate table to play on, which makes setup for this game more difficult than some.

Messy and Confusing

The fast pace of the game caused people to throw their cards everywhere, hoping they would land on a pile (especially when playing on a long desk where not everyone could reach), which ultimately made the game far more confusing than it had to be. Sometimes piles would spill over and it would take a moment to figure out which card is the top card since the cards would be scattered, and if we didn’t clear finished piles (with 10 cards) right away, we often wouldn’t notice when that pile couldn’t be added to anymore. The messiness of the game would sometimes give me a headache when trying to figure out what’s what.

Negative Scores

I feel like I’m being picky complaining about this one, but it was always frustrating to finish a round only to end up with a score in the negatives. This would be especially annoying if we were playing the full game, where we would race to be the first player with 100 points. The frustrating part about this is that even though you may have had an amazing previous round where you earned yourself plenty of points, if you do badly at the next round, you can just as easily lose all those points you just earned. Unlucky players may even have bad rounds a few times in a row, and then they can never really catch up because their total score would be so far into the negatives. This just doesn’t make players feel very good about the scoring system.

Temptation to Stop Rather than Breezing Through Your Hand

Sometimes, if I turned up a card from my hand that I can almost use (and which would help me to put down a card from my row), I was tempted to stop flipping through my deck and just wait and see if someone would put down the card before mine. For instance, if I had a blue 9 in my row, a blue 6 was on a pile in the middle, and I flipped up a blue 8 in my hand, I would sometimes wait, hoping that someone would put down a blue 7, even though I should probably keep going through my hand. This would often slow me down somewhat, which was definitely less fun than keeping the game fast.

What I Would’ve Designed Differently

I was thinking about my last point that I disliked in Ligretto, which was the fact that sometimes I would be tempted to pause while going through my hand because I didn’t want to lose a good card. Then, I thought of a possible solution. I don’t know how well this would work in practice, but in my head it sounds neat, so I might as well just explain it.

My idea would be to add one more mechanic to the game – the concept of an empty “slot” to add a special card from your hand to, in order to keep that card for later. This would allow you to keep flipping through your hand while keeping the card out that you may want to use after another player puts the card before it down. If you change your mind and find another card in your hand that you want to keep out instead of the one you already put in your slot, perhaps you could exchange them by putting the slotted card back into your hand, and put the card from your hand into your slot. This would make the game more complex, but it would be interesting to see how gameplay would change as a result of this.