Matthew BaileyHaving played “Pokémon Splendour”, one of my absolute favourite games in recent months, it was only natural that I embarked on a South Korean Pokémon spree, which included purchasing “Pokémon Chips”. We played this as a family on a recent camping trip and it has since been brought out quite a few times.
“Pokémon Chips” is a quick and interesting game of betting on percentages that I thoroughly enjoyed playing.
You start with a load of Pokéballs in a bag: five red, four white, three blue, two yellow, and one Master Ball. Each player then randomly draws five Pokémon, each of which has a different condition of capture. These range from having a certain amount of Pokéballs or a certain colour, not having a certain colour Pokéball, having a Pokéball drawn on the last turn, having more of one colour than another, or a specific mix of coloured balls.
Essentially, you are trying to end up at the end of the round with two Pokémon, ideally as valuable as possible, that meet the conditions that you find in front of you.
On the first turn, you draw four Pokéballs out of the bag and at that point, all players have to discard one of their five Pokémon. At this point, you have to start doing some mental maths in your head and try to work out what is the best probability in terms of cards to keep. This then gets whittled down as the next hand you draw three balls and discard, and then two balls and discard.
In the end, you are left with two cards that, hopefully, if you’ve discarded and bet correctly, get you some points. The first person to either 10 stars or one trophy wins.
There is also a slightly more complicated version that allows you to use special powers depending on which trainer you use. These are fun little additions but definitely, in my opinion, the purer, equal game is better.
Production-wise, it’s fine. Having played “Pokémon Splendour” recently, I wish this came with actual poker chips in the same way that “Pokémon Splendour” does. But to be honest, if you already own “Pokémon Splendour”, you can actually just use the chips from that to play this, which makes it a much more tactile and pleasant experience.
I really like “Pokémon CHips”. It’s got a fun push-your-luck/play-the-percentages theme that can sometimes reward a lucky guess. It’s light and easy to play, and both Jack and Toby understood how to play immediately. My only gripe is that it finishes quite quickly, with 10 stars being very obtainable in two rounds. When we played later, we ended up playing towards a larger number of stars to make the game last a bit longer, but this is hardly a big deal.
As usual with South Korean games, they are not the easiest to get hold of. However Ben Davenward over at www.travel-games.co.uk managed to get this one in for me and have let me know that they have more on order. So, if you’re interested in a copy, put your name down on the request form and they will email you as soon as a copy comes in.
“Pokémon Chips” is a really enjoyable and simple game that can definitely help teach children about probability. I would definitely recommend it, even if, being a Korean imp
