Mojo Review

boardgamequest.com:

Mojo is a seemingly supernatural power, influence, or ability. Do you have mojo for certain things? I’m not sure if I have a mojo for anything. Except maybe getting things off high shelves for my wife. She says I’m good at that.

In the other definition, Mojo is also the team for a Cuban marinade containing garlic, olive oil, and sour oranges. It’s actually quite delicious.

In tabletop gaming terms, it’s a new shedding game from 25th Century Games. Play cards, try and go out, and avoid points.

Mojo comes with a deck of 79 cards divided up into 5 suits. The suits have an uneven breakdown, for example, there are 8 blue cards (4 each of values 0 and 1), and there are 18 yellow cards (6 each of values 5, 6, and 7).

Each player starts with a hand of 8 cards and on your turn, you must discard a card. Then, one of 3 things will happen:

As soon as a player has 3 or fewer cards in their hand, the game switches to “Mojo Time”. That player places their remaining cards face down in front of them in a row. The rest of the players continued to play normally, but when it gets back to that player’s turn, they flip over one of their facedown cards. As soon as either a player has gone out, or the player flips over the last of their facedown cards, the round ends.

This is where things get a little tricky. Whichever player caused the round to end (either by going out or flipping over the last card) takes the Mojo card. Then players tally up their scores. They keep the highest value card from each suit they have and add them to get their score for the round.

If you have the Mojo card and your score was the lowest of all players that round, you score zero for the round. If you weren’t the lowest, you get your score, +10 additional points.

Then cards are collected and a new round begins. The game ends when a player reaches 50 points. The player with the lowest score is the winner.

Despite my wordy overview above, Mojo is a pretty straightforward game to play. It kind of has an Uno-like