No Thanks
review by Alapai
No Thanks! is a set collection card drafting game designed by Thorsten Gimmler, currently being published by CMYK Games. In it, you take turns drafting cards, trying to collect runs of sequential cards, ultimately trying to earn the lowest score in order to win.
No Thanks! is a very simple game to learn. The game contains 33 cards, numbered from 3 through 35. At the start of a game, you remove 9 cards face down so that nobody knows what is unavailable in the deck, then deal everybody an equal number of chips (11 in most games, but 9 or 7 chips in 6 or 7 person games respectively). Then you flip over the top card of the deck and start play. On your turn, you have two choices. You can take the card or you can say “No Thanks!” and put a chip on the card. Either way, play moves to the next person. If you take the card, you also take all of the chips on top of the card. This continues until the deck no longer has any cards left in it. Your score is determined by the values of the cards you took, but any sets of sequential cards only count as the lowest card among them (ie if you have the cards 20, 21 and 22, you earn 20 points for those cards). Each chip you have left reduces your score by 1. Once you add up your score, the person with the lowest score is the winner!
While turns only have two choices, there is still a good amount of strategy in trying to figure out whether or not you should take a card. Most simply, a card’s actual value isn’t just the number on it, but the number minus the chips, so the 17 card is only 17 points right when it flips, but less points the more chips people place on it. Beyond that though, cards are also worthwhile when trying to collect sequential cards. If you have the 18 card, then the 17 actually is worth -1 by itself as it will reduce your total value by 1. Or if you want to evaluate differently, it is even one less point as you save a chip by not placing it down! And even more so, everybody’s cards are public, so you know what cards your opponent might want as well. So if your opponent has the 16 and 18 card, then the 17 is super valuable to them as it will reduce their score by 18. And while taking it might add 17 to your score, taking it away from your opponent might end up being more valuable in the long run.
No Thanks! is ultimately a pretty simple game that can be played pretty quickly. It’s not the type of game you try to build a game night around, but it is the type of game you can play while waiting for other people to arrive or if you want a lighter game after or in between heavier games.
The CMYK version of the game is one of the games from their Magenta series of games that come in a simple magenta outer slipcase with a stylized box. The components are very striking with each of the cards having stylized numbers getting harsher and harsher as the values increase and the chips being little, pink, wooden smiley faces. If you’re looking to display your games on your shelf, then you can keep the boxes as they share an aesthetic that can look nice together. Otherwise, the box is larger than it needs to be for its components. I purchased a double-wide Ultra PRO deck box (their Tri-Compartment deck box specifically) and took out the insert in order to fit both the cards and the chips. It reduced the size immensely which makes the game much easier to take with me places.
One thing that I did find annoying with the game though is the size of the cards. If you like to sleeve your games like I do, it is not a simple task to sleeve these cards. While the game has cards that are almost Tarot sized (70mmx120mm), the almost is unfortunately in the wrong direction. The cards are 73mmx119mm which means that they are too wide for Tarot sleeves and too narrow for Dixit Sleeves (80mmx120mm). While there are some sleeves that are 75mm wide, they are not tall enough to sleeve these cards. I had to resort to buying Swan Panasia’s 77mmx128mm sleeves, made for the game Kill the Overlord, that are slightly wider than I need and taller than I would normally be comfortable with, but they are sleeves that actually fit without much wiggle room width-wise so ultimately I am okay with the extra height.
I first learned No Thanks! about 14 years ago at one of the very first official Board Game Nights that Gamescape ran. During that night, we played a bunch of different games, but ultimately capped the night off with a round of No Thanks!. There were three of us playing and while I didn’t know one of the other players, I was good friends with the third person. We both liked to grief each other in our Magic Commander games and so we decided to grief each other in No Thanks! as well. And while that ultimately ended up with both of us having the most awful hands and losing horribly, we had way more fun than the other person as he was trying to play the game seriously. While I don’t recommend griefing the other people unless you know they will enjoy it, No Thanks! is a game where you can screw people over mostly at your own expense.
Ultimately, if you are looking for a very simple game that is a great filler game, I do highly recommend No Thanks! as it is a lot of fun and plays quickly.
No Thanks! is available now from our webstore.
