“Magenta,” they call it. “Magenta.” The idea that the slipcases for publisher CMYK’s new line of card games are “magenta” became, in short order, the most controversial topic my gaming group had encountered in some time. This is the hottest, warmest shade of magenta I’ve ever seen.
This is pink
I confess to having been at the forefront of this losing position. Magenta, in my mind, is something closer to a plum, or a maroon. These slipcases are so radically pink that my copies’ public debut prompted people to bring out their color wheels. Arguments were made that this Lisa Frank monstrosity is not, in fact, magenta. Our Pantone samples settled the matter. “It would seem I don’t know what magenta is,” someone—not me, I swear—was heard to say. All parties agreed that the games are in fact magenta, but only just, and not everyone was happy about it.
Superficial debates aside, the presentation of Magenta is immaculate. Each slipcase, sturdy and literally radiant, houses a box containing a simple card game. The rules, oversized and concise, are held in a pocket on the inside of the inner box lid. Whatever minimal components you might need for each game are stored, along with the prerequisite deck of cards, in a plain white paperboard insert. It’s all very sleek and very modern, an aesthetic that suggests IKEA got into games publishing.
The four games included in this initial wave—the plan, it seems, is to add an additional title every year—are Fives, Duos, Figment, and Fruit Fight. All four titles have seen print before. Magenta is not about original designs; it aspires to be a sort of reference library for charming little card games.
The Games
Fives
Fives is a Japanese trick-taking game, three words as likely as any to set my heart aflutter. A color-negative reprint of Taiki Shinzawa’s The Green Fivura, Fives presents players with a two-sided deck. The cards in your hand are whatever they show on the front, but they can also always—well, under certain circumstances—be played as a magenta five. Every time you win a trick, you set it aside with the card you played atop the others. The goal is to have the value of your winning cards add up to as close to 25 as possible without going over. Like many Shinzawa trick-takers, Fives is predicated on a simple twist, but one that can lead to some clever moments at the table.
Duos
Duos, née Team Play, is a collaborative game from designer Johannes Schmidauer-König. Teams compete to complete sets of cards, drawing and passing to their partner. On the one hand, Duos is a race, since the game ends as soon as either team has seven completed sets. On the other hand, more difficult sets are worth more points, so it is entirely possible that the tortoise wins this race. I will confess to not liking Duos much, I found it pleasant and forgettable, but I have seen numerous people express excitement that Team Play has a new edition, so I may be in the minority here.
Figment
Figment is as close to an original title as we’re getting here, since this is a heavy and cooperative reimplementation of Wolfgang Warsch’s Illusion. I’ve grown with time to appreciate the Warschian card game aesthetic, embodied in his smashes The Mind and The Game: simple rules and a heavy focus on what’s going on above the table. Figment delivers on that. Each card in this deck shows an abstract design made up of four colors. At the beginning of each round, the table is assigned a color. As a group, you have to arrange five cards in order by what percentage of the art consists of that color.
It’s tremendous fun, arguing with one another about whether or not such-and-such aspect of a design is creating an optical illusion, or whether three of those circles look like they’d cover the same surface area as this square. Once five cards have been revealed and arranged, the group has to wager bonus points on getting the entire round correct. Revealing the percentages on the back of each card—don’t worry, there are so many that you’re unlikely to ever memorize them—has, without exaggeration, led to some of the loudest screaming I’ve ever heard at a gaming table. Figment is a good time.
Fruit Fight
Finally, Fruit Fight is a reimplementation of Reiner Knizia’s Cheeky Monkey. This is a push-your-luck game in the grand tradition of mind-bogglingly simple push-your-luck games. The deck consists of ten different kinds of fruit, each worth a different amount of points. The higher the value of the card, the fewer of them will appear in the deck. At the start of your turn, you flip over a card. You may continue to flip over and reveal as many cards as you want, one at a time, but you always run the risk of busting by revealing a second card of any type.
If you bust, you clear the table in front of you. If you don’t bust, though, you now have a target on your back. The cards in front of you at the end of your turn do not score until the beginning of your next turn. If another player reveals a card that matches one of yours, they get to steal it. This can lead to a series of exchanges in which players keep trading ownership of the same, increasingly-valuable stack of cards, which only drives people to be more inclined to push their luck. Fruit Fight is based around a perfect little feedback loop of incompatible priorities, and it is, at lower player counts, a lot of fun. The box says it goes up to six, but I can’t recommend crossing the 3-4 player threshold. It gets too chaotic.
Choose Your Audience
For myself, as a hobbyist gamer with limited capacity for new games, none of the titles in Magenta are exceptional. The risk with this series is that, while CMYK is elevating maligned card games to a more noble and deservéd production, they are also elevating unambiguously small-box experiences to a medium-box aesthetic. I don’t know if people will follow the publisher there or not. Personally, as much as I adore CMYK, I can’t afford the shelf space.
That said, I don’t think I am Magenta’s intended audience. Much as I adore small card games, this isn’t a hobbyist product. With games like Wavelength and Lacuna, CMYK has made a name for itself outside of the hobby sphere. Even if people don’t know who the publisher is, they recognize the aesthetic and they know the games. I think of Magenta as more of an attempt to bring people to hobby games than the other way around. My only issue with this release, that the boxes are bigger than any of these games not only require but warrant, is negated by considering the retail spaces to which CMYK now applies its energies. A family looking for a fun game at Target will not only be drawn to Magenta, they’ll almost certainly love it. Hell, in that context, Fives might even qualify as avant-garde. Magenta sets out to do something very specific, something that will likely have a great deal of appeal, and at that, it excels.
These are all right up my wife’s alley! Just ordered all of them from Amazon.