Very Briefly

The Brambles (John Burton) is a solo card game with a great Gothic horror aesthetic wherein you use card combinations to battle a mystical, deadly bramble thicket that has stolen a group of children.

Plainly speaking: The Brambles is a solo/coop take on familiar Rummy-style mechanics that adds twists with special cards and a simple yet fierce opponent.

Briefly

  • Due to the Rummy-style mechanics that The Brambles uses, the game is effectively very approachable even to casual gamers.
  • Yet its simplicity belies both its difficulty and the decisions you must make throughout the game to race against the deck and defeat the Bramble thicket.
  • The difficulty of the game can be tweaked both lower and higher even with just the base game, through adding and removing the special cards while not touching the numbered, suited cards.
  • Rummy-style mechanics include:
    • Using melds to defeat various Bramble cards, from a Bramble deck, in a hexagonal layout of different difficulties.
    • Three-card melds have different strengths (in Rummy, their point value) based on their difficulty to construct.
    • Far more difficult six-card melds can clear more Bramble cards.
    • Honor cards can affect the strength of a meld, which echoes honor cards in the Mahjongg variants in the Rummy family.
  • Special helpful cards allow you to manipulate (slightly) the deck as well as extend your hand to allow more flexibility as the game progresses.
  • Yet unhelpful cards – the Bramble curse cards – are also in your deck, and you must address these as soon as possible when they end up in your hands, taking up valuable time as the deck size decreases.
  • Note that The Game Crafter version of the game comes with an expansion bundled in – though it’s also available in the PNP – that allows you to further increase and even decrease difficulty.
  • I find myself playing this game repeatedly due to its simplicity yet dastardly, necessary decisions. You’re not purely at the mercy of the shuffled deck, and a strong knowledge of how to play Rummy well will assist you in this game. And that’s rare among non-traditional card games!

Lục Bát

Your simplicity tempts me,
Yet your difficulty betrays
Fiendish depths beneath that
Smiling mask. Night after night,
I seek to unmask you, but
Your secrets you never betray.