Uno Zero

Out of all the relatively mainstream games that we review here, Uno is one I’m always up for whenever a new version comes out, and today we’re going to be looking at Uno Zero.

I’m going to start by saying that Uno Zero is actually one of my favourite Uno games. I’ve played it quite a lot, probably largely because it doesn’t really play much like Uno at all. Instead, it plays very similarly to a game called Skyjo.

You start the game by giving six cards to each player and each player forms a six-by-two grid in front of them. Players then get to turn over one card, and you’re ready for the game to begin.

What you are essentially trying to do is get rid of your grid and, at the same time, make sure that what is left of your grid scores as low as possible. When you take a card, either from the top of the discard pile or the top of the draw pile, you can then do one of two things. You can replace this card face up with a card in your grid, which is beneficial as you get to know what it is. Also, if you end up with a column of two cards that either match colour, number or type, you can discard them.

If you can’t, you can either put the card straight into the discard pile and turn over one of your cards, revealing it, or you can simply swap a card with it, which is always a good idea if the card you’ve got is a lower value.

Things such as Skip Turn, Reverse, and +2 are present here as well, but these are coloured cards with values on them, because they are worth something, and normally quite high too. The abilities of these only take effect when you discard the card, so sometimes you can actually use the card quite comfortably to clear something in your grid and then activate it, potentially messing up the other players.

This continues with players trying to aggressively whittle down their grids until one player has all cards in their grid turned over, thus ending the round. All the other players then turn their cards over and are still allowed to clear anything that qualifies, meaning the player who finishes the round isn’t necessarily going to be the one with the lowest score.

In a full-length game, you play for nine rounds and the person with the lowest score at the end of those nine rounds wins. In the few times we’ve played this so far, we’ve generally played to five, as nine is a little bit long, but five seems to work just as well.

I’m going to say it – I really like Uno Zero. I think Uno Zero is probably the best game you can currently buy that bears the Uno branding, partly because it’s nothing like Uno.

With the need for the grid, it’s not quite a game you can play in the back seat of a car in quite the same way as regular Uno, but it’s still pretty compact and this will definitely be in my camping bag when we go away later in the summer.