Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Back in high school, countless lunch hours were spent huddling around our oblong tables with piles of playing cards as we repeatedly pounded the playing surface over and over again. Slapjack may be an early iteration of slapping card games, but it paved the way for a genre that gave us the magic of Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. Now, other companies seek to emulate that game’s success, with one of the latest being Cool Cool Cool, designed by Keith Baker and Jennifer Ellis of Twogether Studios.
Cool Cool Cool Overview
If you’ve played any slapping games in the past, you’ll find plenty of familiarity with Cool Cool Cool. After evenly distributing the cards between all players, each person takes a turn flipping their top card over into the center of the table to form a communal pile, saying the name of the card in the process. If one of the active rules is triggered by this card, players try to be the first to slap the stack and collect all of the cards played in the round thus far.
The gimmick in this game, however, is that there are eight rules cards that will change the slapping conditions. For example, the base game plays with Pairs, Panini, and The Name of the Game. Pairs would mean that two of the same card are played consecutively. Panini means that a pile can be slapped if the top two cards are matching but they’re separated by one other card. The Name of the Game rule comes into effect if the word Cool appears three times in succession between the top two cards or the top card.
Play continues until one player is completely out of cards, and then whoever has the most cards is declared the coolest winner of all time. I’ve played neverending variations of other slapping games that only end when someone has all of the cards, so this is actually a nice change of pace.
Cool Cool Cool Brings the Lingo
I’ll be the first to jump up and say that I love the word choices in the game because they can all be punched up a bit and given a big heaping of acting flavor. It also captures a sort of linguistic zeitgeist by including words like Slay and Matthew McConaughey’s Alright Alright Alright. Seriously, he was the inspiration for that one.
Cool Cool Cool also delivers on its promise of having a tongue-twisting element as well. If I had a nickel every time that I said Swicked because I mixed Wicked and Sick together, I could finally retire and swim around in my Scrooge McDuck pile of coins. Once you factor in the cards that show Cool multiple times, you might even start saying these words in your sleep.
That being said, I don’t really feel as though the game brings anything unique or innovative to the genre. What makes something like Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza really fun is that you’re mixing in those actions on the special cards to mimic groundhogs and gorillas. It’s not only about the slap. With Cool Cool Cool, however, it really is just slapping even if the slappable criteria is changing.
Without the changing criteria, this game would likely be forgettable, so it at least has that going for it. The rules can even change in the middle of a game thanks to the aforementioned McConaughey card and Tubular. This creates an extra split-second of indecision by the players as they process whether or not a given rule is still in effect or not, which seems to help level the playing field against those players who have the fastest slap in the West.
The other issue that I have with the game is that it’s recommended to remove a bunch of cards if you want to play with 2 or 3 players, which is my typical player count. My qualm with this is that Cool Cool Cool is a super light game that I’d prefer to just pick up and play instead of sorting through the deck to remove cards before I play. In other games, I might just play with the entire deck anyways, but I agree that it’s just too much slapping with 2 players in that case.
Cool Cool Cool Is Cool, but Not As Cool As Advertised
If you want to play a slapping game, you certainly have some options out there for you, with most of them designed as family games. Cool Cool Cool feels like it’s designed for young adults (and older) instead of children—just based on the art alone—and so I was really hoping for something that would set it apart from Slamwich, Yeti Slap, or the game with tacos and felines.
When it comes down to it, Cool Cool Cool is decidedly fine. I really dig the art, but the game seemed to lose its luster quickly for me. Would I rather play Cool Cool Cool over something like Slapjack? Totally. But it just doesn’t offer a truly novel experience for me to run around recommending it to everyone that I know. It just feels like I’ve played this game before.
Cool Cool Cool ends up being sort of cool, but you know what’s cooler than being cool? Ice-cold. And I don’t think this game is there quite yet.
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