Alea Analysis #7: Wyatt Earp (Alea Small Box #1)
In 2001, Alea tried something new. They put out a game in a small box, primarily (one expects) so that they could sell what was essentially a card game without having to charge the large-box price. They'd follow this format for the next four years, until they decided to replace it with a new medium-box size (which has similarly been used for some games that are mostly card games).

The 2001 card game in question was Wyatt Earp, designed by Mike Fitzgerald as a "Mystery Rummy" game, then turned into a more Eurogame by Richard Borg, who sold it to Alea.

The game is pretty much Rummy at its core: you draw cards and you play melds. However, it's got two big differences from that traditional description. First there are sheriff cards, which let you engage in certain actions, like drawing extra cards or adding a new card to a meld of your choice. Second, exactly who gets points for a meld is determined by looking at the total value of all the cards in that color (which could include quite a variety of sheriff cards) and comparing totals.

When I first played this game five years ago, I didn't particularly like it. At the time I was playing a lot of the standard Mystery Rummies, and I found this one needlessly complex, mainly based on its scoring conditions. I just played it for the second time tonight, and I'm much more impressed with it.

The cool thing about the scoring is that it really encourages you to interact with the other people, to get your meld scoring more than theirs--or just to get your own value high enough that you earn something. This process is really helped along by the way the sheriff cards are designed. You have lots of situations where you can really make a meaningful choice for how your cards interact with your opponents'. (The secret for how this works is in the fact that many of the sheriff cards could be used to affect lots of different melds, so you're not just stuck with what you drew, like in standard Rummy.)

Beyond that, I think it's nicely thematic, with the increasing rewards (points), the shoot-outs (where some cards may have an affect based on a draw), and the names of everything working really well together.

And, it's not exactly lighter than the rest of the Alea series, it's just a different sort of game, a real traditional card game, revved up to the next level (and maybe the next level beyond that).

L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)