Sleeping Queens

2nd March and the 2nd game of the night at Matakishi's beckons.

Sleeping Queens is a little card game. It was invention of a 6 year old girl trying to get to sleep one night that became Sleeping Queens.

The game consists of a deck of cards and a number of 'Queen' cards. Sleeping Queens is won by collecting queen cards. Each queen card is worth a number of points and the game is won when a player reaches the point limit (which differs according to the number of players).

Set up
The queen cards are all spread out face down in the gaming area. 5 cards from the deck are randomly dealt to each player. Player proceeds clockwise and each player gets to play 1 card or discard. There are 7 types of cards:

• Kings: Playing a king allows the active player to turn over a queen card and place it in their area.
• Knights: playing this card allows you steal a queen from another player and place it your area.
• Dragons: Dragons trump knights, if someone is trying to steal a queen away from you, playing a dragon counters the knight card.
• Sleeping potions: Puts a queen back to sleep and places her face down back among the other sleeping queens.
• Wands: Wands trump sleeping potions, stopping a queen from falling asleep and being returned face down to the playing area.
• Jesters: Jesters are risky cards. After playing one, the active turns the topmost card on the draw deck over. If it's a power card (any card other than a number card is a power card), then they active player gets to keep it and gets another turn. If it's a number card, then you count off round the players, who ever the count off stops at, gets to wake a queen and place her face up in their playing area.
• Number cards: They are numbered from 1-10 and are worthless, they have no function other than to clog up your hand with unusable cards. Luckily it's possible to discard multiple number cards at a time, depending on what they are and a rudimentary understanding of mathematics. During you turn you may discard a single number card of any value or 2-of-a-kind, 3-of-a-kind and so forth. Or you can discard cards of differing value, provided they 'add up' numerically. So if you have a 1, 2, 4 & 7, you can discard them all by stating, "one plus two plus four equals seven.". 2+7=9 would also work and so on.

Play progresses until a player has collected enough queens to win.

There are a couple of other rules, but that's the gist of the game.

Sleeping Queens is a light game and definitely skews towards younger players, especially with the slightly educational nature of discarding number cards.  But it also has a quick set up and quick play time. Making it a pleasant little filler game or something to end the evening with - especially if you've spent the last couple of hours on some brain-melting strategy game!

One last thing worth mentioning is the art direction. All the artwork is genuinely whimsical, as is the naming of the kings and queens such as Ladybug Queen, Doughnut King, Rainbow Queen etc. It lends the game a I guess sort of appealing timeless quality.