Matthew BaileyI’d like to think that it’s my big, long reviews of epic dungeon crawlers or exciting euro games that get the most traction, but in reality, consistently, the best performing reviews I ever do are when I review a brand new version of “UNO”.
Well, it’s lucky that “Liar’s UNO” is quite possibly the best version of UNO out there right now, and 100% one that I would recommend picking up for Christmas if you like playing UNO with your family.
The rules of “Liar’s UNO” are really simple. Essentially, there are two decks. There is the UNO deck you would expect, and there is a Liar stack, which has black numbers with circles on instead of white. Whenever you play a Liar card, you must play it face down and state what it is.
Now, you can choose to play the card that it actually is, or you can choose to lie and say it’s something it’s not. You can even lie and say it’s something like a +2 pickup card. If someone doesn’t believe you, they can call you a liar, at which point you turn the card over. If they were wrong, they pick up a card, and if you got caught, you pick up a card. Play then continues as normal.
While this is generally a really simple addition, one of the beauties of this version of UNO is that you could literally play it with anyone who understands UNO, because it’s actually quite a minor change. What it does bring in is that fun social deduction element you’d normally get from more complex games, and equally you can liken it to regular mainstream card games like Cheat that, chances are, your grandparents are going to know how to play.
At the start, you end up calling “cheat” on a lot of things, but very quickly you realise that sometimes, even if you think someone is lying, because you want the suit to be changed to what they’re saying it is, it’s actually better just to go along with the lie than to call it out. This adds a really exciting element to the game that I really enjoyed, and the boys really enjoyed too.
Component-wise, everything is the usual UNO quality, and it comes in the really irritating UNO box that holds the two halves of the deck next to each other rather than just letting the whole deck stack together, which is always annoying, but it’s a minor quibble.
While “Liar’s UNO” isn’t some amazing revelation or must-own card game that you’re going to be talking about in board game groups up and down the country, what it is is a very small twist on UNO that adds a massive amount of extra depth to the gameplay. In my opinion, it’s great fun without changing things so much that card game novices can’t easily understand what’s going on.
If you’re going to get a new UNO set for Christmas, this is the one I’d recommend.
