Game summary:
A game for 1 – 5 players
Play time around 15 – 30 Min
Designer: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich
Artist: Shawn Stankewich
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Unboxing
The box contains the following components:
1 Rulebook
129 Game cards
5 Reference cards
50 Currency tokens
15 Bust tokens
The reference cards, the card on the top is the card for the first player.
A few examples of some currency cards
Let’s get it to the table
TEN is an exciting push-your-luck and auction game. You can play this game with the whole family. Players will draw cards one at a time trying to add as many cards as they can with exceeding a total value of Ten or they will be busted. Players may push their luck to draw more cards and use currency tokens to buy an extra card to get the longest number sequence in each color. When wildcards hit the table from the deck, players will compete in an auction to obtain that card in order to fill gaps in their sequences. Will you be the player to get the most points and win this game?
Let’s get the table ready.
Set up the deck, it depends with how many players you will play this game. With a
2 player game; Remove all the cards with the +3 and +4 player symbol in the bottom right corner
3 player game; Remove all the cards with the +4 player symbol in the bottom right corner
4 and 5 player game; no cards are removed.
Now shuffle the deck and place it face down in the middle of the table.
Every player receives five currency tokens, place the rest of the currency tokens next to the deck with the bust tokens.
Now shuffle the reference cards and give every player 1 card, the player that has a card with the starting player symbol will be the first player.
Now we are ready to play!
During your turn you start with drawing the first card from the deck, just one card at-a-time. If it’s a number or currency card place it on the table and choose of you want to continue or not. But be aware, the number cards or the currency cards may not reach more then TEN. If you get to 11 or higher, you are bust.
But if you choose to stop drawing (before you’re busted), you can take the reward. This reward is that you can choose to take the number card(s) or the currency card(s) and take the amount of currency tokens. The Currency cards will be placed on the discard pile, the number cards will be placed in front of you.
After you’ve done this action, you can also choose to buy a card from the market. This is where the numbered cards go to when you don’t take those cards or when you’re busted. You can buy 1 card with the currency tokens that you have into your supply.
So when you draw the first card and this is a number card, you can choose to stop or draw a new card. When you draw a new number card, you add the value of both card together. If this is less then 10 you can choose to continue drawing or not. When you draw a currency card, you subtract that value from the numbered cards, in some cases it can reach les then 0 and you still can continue this action even if the next card is also a currency token. But also the currency cards may never reach a total value of more than 10.
Auction phase
During your turn, you can also draw a wildcard. O this happens, the player stops immediately and an auction begins. After the auction, the player in question picks up where he or she left off.
The auction starts with the first player to the left of the active player until the active player’s turn is over. The player with the highest bid then receives the wildcard.
You may bid as much as you want, as long as you can pay for it with currency tokens, bust tokens but you may also bet on cards. The latter are worth 1 point, regardless of the number on the card.
If none of the players will bid on a card, this wildcard will be discarded.
Buy phase
You may only take a buy phase if you didn’t bust this turn and when you chose to take the number of cards instead of currency as a reward. When you don’t want to buy a card, it’s the next players turn.
You may spend currency tokens, bust tokens and cards to buy a new card from the market. To buy a card you have to pay the value of the card and place it face up in front of you.
You cannot buy a card that is identical with a number an color to a card that is already in front of you.
After you finish buying a card from the market, play passes to the next player clockwise.
The wildcards that you can use instead of any numbers, the cards in that specific color can be used only for that color. There is just one card (left below) that also can be used in any of the four colors
The numbered wildcards, you can use these cards in any of the four colors.
End of the game
The end of the game is triggered when the last card has been drawn from the deck. The active player will resolve their turn as normal but they cannot draw any cards.
After the active player has finished their turn, the other players may take one final buy phase. When the active player has also completed his final buy phase, we start adding up the points.
Players then sort all numbered cards by color including the wildcards. Each player then scores 1 point each each card in the longest consecutive numeric sequence in each color.
Players who have successfully collected all numbers from 1 to 9 in a color receive 1 additional point, making a total of 10 points.
The player with the highest score is the winner of TEN.
Final Conclusion & rating:
Weight: 1.38 / 5
Replayability: 9
My rating: 🎲 🎲 🎲 🎲 🎲 🎲 🎲
Quality of the game
The cards look beautiful, both the back and the cards with the numbers themselves. The figures and colors are very clearly depicted.
We found the explanation in the rules of the game very clear and after going through it we could start right away. In the rules they also give enough examples for when you want to see something extra and that makes it all very nice.
Overall impression of the game
TEN is a very fun and fast card game. The challenge is that you cannot exceed 10. Because Currency cards are drawn which can be subtracted from the numbers already on the table, it is sometimes very tempting to continue anyway. But beware! Also the Currency cards may not exceed 10, if you do, you’re busted and you’ll only receive a currency token worth 3 currency. If you pass at the right moment, you may take the cards or the currency tokens and possibly buy another card from the market. Although it might be easy to pass at first, you’ll soon notice that it can be very tempting to turn over another card after all.
As soon as wildcards appear on the table we’ll start bidding against each other. If you don’t want to play this round that’s no problem, but if you do want to play make sure you bid sensibly. The active player is the last to bid and therefore often has an advantage. This way of bidding is very fun in this game, because you never know when one is on the table. Because the currency tokens are also visible, it can also become a game in itself to challenge someone to bid or just bid a little higher.
It can sometimes be a challenge to get cards in a row and collect points, but that’s also the tricky part: sometimes you have to turn over an extra card to get that one.
We find this a very funny game which you can quickly put on the table, but with enough challenge because you still want to make sure you can get many numbers together to collect as many points as possible.
I want to thank AEG for providing me with this review copy, my thoughts and review are not affected by this.
