One some holidays recently, we got a pack of the card game Phase 10 to play. In theory, a card game deriving from rummy but mixing up the rules a bit should have worked. Unfortunately, I felt it kind of missed the mark.

I feel like the core conceit is a bit broken. Unlike a regular game of rummy, I felt like the game is really not weighted right. It relies on a series of hand “phases” where you can only use certain matches, in contrast to rummy where you can build up your hand using any of the matches from the start. So for example, one round might require pairs only, another a sequence of a certain type.

Over playing multiple games, I felt like the “difficulty” was all over the place. Yes, card games always have an element of random chance, that’s kind of the point. But it did not really feel like there was any strategy that could be used to help counter it and make the game more engaging. The weighting of the difficulty of different phases also felt a bit off, with later ones not really feeling any more difficult than the early ones.

The scoring system is also confusing. The game has two possible end states – You finish all 10 phases and you win, or you finish all 10 phases and the player with the highest score wins. So in theory, someone who hasn’t been progressing through should be able to catch up and overtake the winner. But in practice, I often found it wasn’t really possible to catch up in any meaningful way. Leapfrogging is impossible, because after one person finishes a phase, the entire round stops. So if you fall too far behind, it doesn’t really feel like there’s much point in playing for the win.

It’s an interesting twist on the Rummy game, but I think for now I’ll stick to one of the more traditional variants.