Sonic: The Card Game (2021)

Original Platform: Board game
Original release: 2021

Sonic The Card Game is a blatant rip off of a board game called Diamant or Incan Gold (It has been released under different publishers form the same designer). There’s are no credits credits to the original designers (Bruno Faidutti and Alan R. Moon)

I’ve played Diamant a few times and it’s a very enjoyable push your luck game where you’re exploring a cavern. Before each card flips, you have to decide if you carry on or retreat (you have two cards representing this, you all decide in secret and then flip your choice over at the same time). Any players that retreat will share the gold (rings in this case) on all previous cards and are out of that round (there are five rounds in total).

If two of the same trap type (or enemy type in this, with Dr Robotnik, Metal Sonic and….er Orbot and Cubot, who have never been much of a threat on their own and there could have been so many better choices, even just a Motobug and Buzz Bomber), then any player still racing end up collecting nothing.

At the end of five rounds, the player with the most rings is the winner. There are also relic cards (bonus cars in this, depicting Cream, Charmy, Big, Cream and four Chao), which are worth 5 points, but can only be collected if only one player decides to retreat in a round.

There are a couple of differences in this to Diamant. It only does six players, instead of eight, consisting of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Shadow and Blaze. There are enough characters to pick to do two more.

You also have three lives, if you get defeated by enemies you lose one. Lose all three and you’re out of the game. Frankly, this is a terrible addition to the game and you should just ignore it (not collecting anything is enough of a punishment). The tokens for lives are handy for putting one above the cards and removing it when you leave, so players can easily see who is in or out of the current round.

The other change are special abilities for the relic/bonus cards. I quite like these. One lets you see the top card, one shuffles an enemy back in and one lets you change your card after players have revealed. The risk being that these are worth 5 points if you don’t use them. I like the aspect of sacrificing 5 points for a risk or a potentially higher reward. There’s one that counts as an extra life, which as said above, is a poor feature of the game.

If you want a more portable version of Diamant, or very specifically the Sonic theme, it’s fine, and you can play with the original rules (ignore lives and you can just keep the bonus cards as being five points with no abilities), but overall it’s a worse version of Diamant.