Review on Fantasy Realms WizKids Board Game Card Game by Stacy Sanders

This is a great little card game that is not terribly hard to teach but has a lot going for it and some complexity. At its heart it's a Rummy variant - each player has a hand of 7 cards. On your turn, you either draw a card or choose a discard to take into your hand. Then, you have to discard one card. The game ends when there are 10 discards - tally up your points and see who wins!That's the whole game! Or at least, you could struggle your way through one game with that information. See, this deck of 53 cards includes 10 distinct suits and 3 suitless cards that copy other cards in the deck. Every single card in the deck is unique, and comes with unique BONUS scoring interactions that make it better with other cards in hand as well as unique PENALTY interactions that are bad for you with other cards in hand. Sometimes things might get BLANKd by an effect - that's really bad because it essentially "destroys" that card from your hand, meaning you wasted a card slot if a BLANKd card makes it to your final hand. Other times you get a CLEAR, that's normally good because a Clear is like a more specific Blank, able to target specific parts of cards, most often getting rid of those pesky penalties.But what's perhaps best about this game is that you always feel like you're reaching for the stars - shooting the moon might be what fans of trick takers would call it. It's not hard to get hands in the hundreds - in fact its expected - but when you get a card that's only a miniscule number of points but becomes worth exponentially more if you have these 3 specific others AND you already have 1 of those, it's hard to not feel the draw of trying to collect those last two, even though there's no guarantee they even show up this game. Almost EVERY card has an interaction like that which lures you along with it. And yet some of the highest scoring interactions are the most subtle. There's something new to discover about the cards and how they work together in almost every game of Fantasy Realms - it offers a lot of potential play for fans, but isn't so hard to introduce new people to (they might even win!).