Okay. Yeah. This is a mass market game, one that you can find on the shelves of Target and Wal-Mart and-

Hey! Where is everyone going?

All right, for the two or three of you who are still here- um, is that guy in the back snoring? Yeah, he is. Great.

All right already. Sequence is a five in a row game themed around playing cards (Wouldn’t have been my first choice either) with a lot of random elements. The game itself consists of a board with an American, two decks of cards, and some actually pretty spiffy looking not-quite-poker chips in three different colors. If you want to play more than three people, you’re going to have to play in teams.

It is a mass market game that you can find in strangers' closets all over the country, people who have never even heard of Board Game Geek or Klaus Teuber and what are you doing in their closet anyway? So, the odds are, you actually already have a sense of how the game is played. Let me give you a quick overview of the rules anyway. It won’t take that long.

Each player has a hand of cards. The board shows two decks worth of cards spiraling around in what actually is an honest to goodness pattern. You play a card and put one of your chips on one of the two matching spaces on the board. If there’s already a chip there, you can’t mark that space.

The object of the game is to get five chips in a row, which is cunningly called a sequence. It can be long ways, sideways, or diagonal, just like Connect Four. In a two player game, you need to get two sequences but with more players, one will win you the game.

Ah, but there are some more rules! The board doesn’t have any jacks on it. Jacks are magic! A one-eyed jack will let you remove a chip (but you can’t break a sequence. Them is golden) and a two-eyed jack is wild, letting you play a chip anywhere.

Sequence also has a built in fun-filled nasty rule. If you forget to draw a card before the next guy’s turn, you’re out of luck. Your hand just went down one card. Got to love a game where they actually include a game that punishes folks for being absentminded.

Anyway, that’s Sequence. Friend of mine likes it enough that she makes me play it. I got a copy for myself since I like the chips and it’s a game that I do play every once in a while. So, what’s it really like and should you run out and buy it like it was the next Ticket to Ride?

The answer to that last question is no, by the way.

First off, I got to make a rhetorical question. Who themes a game around playing cards? Honestly. Sequence could have been themed around ANYTHING. You could have just used one through forty-eight twice if you felt like it and it would be easy to plug in any kind of symbol. So, why playing cards? I know, I know, mass market audience but even still, it’s BORING!

All right, theme to one side. Mechanically, Sequence is a five in the row game like Connect Four or Pente or even Tic-Tac-Toe and Nine Man Morris. It’s an old and honorable design. What Sequence does is severely limit your placement choices. The luck of the draw turns the game from a zero-sum, perfect information abstract to a pretty luck-based game.

Yes, there are some moves better than other moves. However, you might not have any of those good moves in your hand. A bad hand can easily lose the game and a good hand can easily win the game. Yeah, the laws of averages mean that a good player is going to win more often than a bad player but a bad player still has a decent chance.

What’s Sequence good for? Well, it’s a mass market game that actually does have some real decisions in so it’s okay to play with people who run away screaming from Puerto Rico. However, since your decisions are limited by your hand so it’s a decent game when you don’t want to think too hard. So you get to think but you don’t have to think all that much.

Personally, I’d give it a six out of ten. It’s got a nice beat and you can dance to it. I’ll play it and I can have fun playing it. If you tell me I have to compare it to the other stuff at Wal-Mart, I’ll knock it up to an eight.