Skyrockets: Festivals of Fire Review
What do you think of when you think of fireworks? For me, it’s the rush of excitement that comes from loud noises and bright, beautiful colors on display. In Skyrockets: Festivals of Fire, you get much of the same experience in a cooperative game that puts you in the role of working with your fellow players to put on a fireworks show for your wizard school.
Read on to see if Skyrockets blasts off to greatness or fizzles on the ground!
Skyrockets is a cooperative real-time game where the goal is to advance the countdown timer, while keeping the other fireworks timers running. On a player’s turn, they play a card and flip the two sand timers whose colors are on the card. The only caveat to this is that they can only flip and advance the countdown timer if it has already run out. Play then continues to the next player, who plays a card and flips timers, and so on. If a fireworks timer runs out, players have two opportunities to reflip a timer to keep it running. The game ends in victory when the countdown timer reaches the end of the countdown track, or ends in defeat if a fireworks timer runs out for a third time.
The game begins with the basic rules as described above, but contains 29 more scenarios with increasing complexity of rules within each setup. In the first scenario after the intro, you have a reduced hand size and a stack of 10 unknown cards that you can flip instead of playing a known card from your hand, with the 10 cards all having to be played before victory can be achieved. Some scenarios prohibit talking, some provide all the cards in a Freecell-type layout, and some end up being more like puzzles. Each scenario has its own feel and level of difficulty.
Skyrockets fires off the table with a bang! To get into the game requires no time at all—we brought it to a game night and we were having players rotate in and out of the game after watching a single scenario. It is also worth noting that two of these players were 9 and 7 years old, showing that
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