$15, 15-minute card game Now! could be your next obsession after 6 nimmt and The Mind

I’m a huge fan of card games that cost relative tuppence, take up little more space than a standard deck of 52 and pack an intense bit of challenge and/or competition into their compact stack of cards - but it’s okay, because things wrap up in just 15 minutes and everyone’s friends again. With the rulers of that very specific genre being the likes of the ruthless 6 nimmt and co-op gem The Mind, upcoming card game Now! looks like it might be one of 2024’s more promising challengers to the “short, cheap and entertaining” throne.

In fact, Now! has a touch of both 6 nimmt and The Mind to it, with gameplay being driven by a deck of cards with little more than numbers on them. In this case, each player has a unique deck of cards numbered from one to 128 - but with no two players having exactly the same number on their cards.

In the middle of the table, three target cards are revealed. When things kick off, all of the players must race to find a card in their own deck that comes closest to one of the target numbers (or multiple) without going over - The Price is Right rules, if you will.

This all happens in real-time, with players quickly drawing through their deck to find the best possible card. The trick? Any cards that you discard for not being close enough - or too high - stay on the table and don’t rejoin your deck until a ‘refresh’ card is drawn from the stack of target cards. So if you plough your way through your cards too quickly, you might end up having to use the last card in your deck for the next few rounds.

Each target card is worth a different amount of points, with the cards split into red and blue suits - you minus your total for one colour from the other to get your final score, rewarding careful play to claim only the cards that will increase your score rather than see it drop.

The seemingly simple gameplay is backed up by some clever behind-the-scenes design maths from creator Silvano Sorrentino, which ensures that all eight of the player decks are equally balanced around the possible target cards without repeating any numbers between players - and precisely four cards in each deck match a possible target exactly.

Now! will be released on April 17th by publisher Scorpion Masque, joining the studio’s similarly subversive takes on party games like Decrypto, Turing Machine and Stay Cool - along with its two-player co-op Sky Team, which won Best Board Game at last year’s Tabletop Awards. Now! will cost $15 and take around 15 minutes to play with up to eight players, with a two-player variant also in the rulebook.