You’ve arrived for your vacation, and it’s time to hit the luau! As you arrive, you see a table full of beautiful and vibrant flowers. Once you meet some other guests at the party, you and the other players will begin making your own leis.

That’s the setting for Lucky Luau – a new card game from CardLords.

It’s a simple and quick card game where players draw flowers, leaves, and kukui nuts to string along their leis. Whoever has the best scoring lei when the flowers run out is the winner.

 

How to play Lucky Luau

To begin, each player is given a Knife, Fish Hook, and Spacer card, and 3 Guest cards are drawn at random (from a possible 16) and placed face-up near the play area. The Guest cards offer bonus points for players. All the other cards are shuffled and tossed, face-down, in a big pile in the center of the table.

On a player’s turn, they draw one card from the central pile. If they draw a face-down card, they can choose to either place it in their personal lei or toss it back onto the pile face-up. If they draw a face-up card, they must add it to their lei.

Player must string their leis from left to right in front of them. As they draw and add more cards to their lei, they’ll place each subsequent one to the right of their last card.

Players may also play their Knife, Fish Hook, and Spacer as an additional action on their turn.

• The Knife lets them remove a card from anywhere in their lei.
• The Fish Hook is placed like the other cards in the player’s lei. If at the end of the game, the Fish Hook is in the center of their lei, they get 10 points. If it’s 1 off from the center, they get 5 points.
• The Spacer is placed in the lei as well. Later on, when drawing cards, a player may pace a just-acquired card on the Spacer.

Once the pile of lei cards is empty, the game ends and players score their leis and bonus points.

All Flowers, Leaves, and Kukui Nuts score points in different ways.

The various colored Flowers score points based on which colored flowers are adjacent to them. The Rainbow Flowers act as a wild card and are scored as if they were a colored flower that they’re next to. The Mega Leaf scores 1 point for every Leaf anywhere in the lei. And the Kukui Nuts score an increasing amount based on how many nuts are in the lei.

Players then get bonus points based on which Guests they’ve pleased. Here are some examples of Guest cards:

• The player with the most flowers in their lei.
• The player with the most of a certain color flower.
• The player with the least total cards in their lei.
• Players who don’t use kukui nuts in their lei.
• Players whose first card matches their last card.
• Players who use 5 different flowers.

After totaling their points, the player with the most points wins.

 

Can the whole family enjoy Lucky Luau?

CardLords games are great games for playing with the whole family and Lucky Luau is no different.

From the gameplay to the colorful artwork, Luck Luau is meant for family play. For starters, it’s a very simple game to play — Draw a card, place it, move on to the next player. And whether you win or not, you’ll have a colorful lei displayed in front of you to appreciate.

As the name implies, the game leans towards the “luck” side of the spectrum between strategy and luck.

Players are at the whim of the lucky card draw from the pile as to which cards they can add to their lei. Yes, during the game there will be some cards face-up on the pile that a player could strategically take. But most of the card draws are from face-down cards.

There is a little bit of strategy in choosing how to build out their lei, but if you’re not getting the right cards, you may have to toss that out the window and go with the flow.

That being said, the Guest cards will lend themselves well to directing some of your choices.

We love the Guest cards mainly for that very reason. From the 16 possible Guests, only 3 are used in a game. And we really like that variable scoring from what they reward points for. If you want to score well, focus your choices around getting the most from the Guests in play.

For example, if the 3 Guests in the game are “points for using 3 or fewer colors of flowers”, “points for anyone who doesn’t use Red flowers” and “points for the person with the most leaves”, then totally try to max out using leaves and nuts. Your leave and nut points will multiply well and you’ll get 18 bonus points!

Of course, we also like that the game plays up to 6 players. That’s always something we like to look for as a family of 6.

For a family game, the only catch is that there’s a lot of text on the cards to read. So younger players will need to be able to read. However, after playing a few times, players won’t need to read anything on the cards because they’ll know what each type of card does. The text on the cards just explains how those flowers, leaves, and nuts score.

This makes us wonder why that information couldn’t be displayed on the card in the form of colored icons instead of text. For example, if a flower scores based on being next to certain colored flowers, just put those possible colors as dots on both the left and right edges of the cards — showing that they want to be next to a flower of that color — etc.

Overall, Lucky Luau is a quick card game with simple choices that will have everyone creating a unique lay every time. If you’re fans of quick card games lick UNO, Lucky Luau is right up your alley. The big plus for Lucky Luau though is that you’ll have something beautiful spread out before you in the end.

If Lucky Luau sounds like a game your family would enjoy playing, hop on over to the Kickstarter campaign page and pre-order a copy.