Am I likely to be better off with the best card now or in a future round? And as you can see, even this is speculation.įurther, there are risk management decisions in which cards to attract. If I take the fireflies, they reason, I’ll have better choices later. As fireflies pile up on cards, you can see the glint in players’ eyes. The firefly system is clever, though, because it often tempts players to act against their immediate interest. They’re small enough that they fit in the hand, but the way they catch the light can induce greed in even the most prudent players. The glass beads are a wonderful choice for the game. Smile, more than anything else, is a speculation game, and by bidding fireflies, you’re betting on a future opportunity to get something better. Smile is dependent on other players’ decisions, and players can surprise you with their choices. Anyone can take a high-valued card the trick is to keep it, and you have to balance spending fireflies to get a card and having enough fireflies on hand later to avoid losing it.īut just because it’s simple to tell what other players have and want doesn’t mean it’s easy to get the best card for you. And the splotches are ingenious: they betray the speculation game that Smile covers with a whimsical veneer. It’s easy to tell at a glance that if someone has a high-value pink card, they probably don’t want another pink splotch, or if someone has a negative-value blue card, they probably do want another blue splotch. Smile simplifies this by putting colored splotches on the corner of cards: if you collect two of the same splotch, you lose both cards. Sometimes in an auction game, it’s hard to properly evaluate what other players are interested in. What makes Smile so tense is the variable value for cards for different players. Getting a high score can be…difficult, especially since you can only have one card of each color. This system is brilliant because it focuses on player interaction and heightens tension as players try to get the cards they want. In either case, the compensation for taking the worse option is winning the other players’ currency to be used in future bidding. In Mogul (and in No Thanks!), the center of the action is a pay-to-play auction, where players are bidding to either win or avoid winning an auction. Smile takes as its basis an earlier Michael Schacht design, Mogul (whose auction system was later popularized by the filler game No Thanks!). It’s quick, tense, and quirky, with just enough difference to stand on its own as a top-tier filler game. Michael Schacht is known for creating very tight, very clever designs that offer good decisions with a slender ruleset, and Smile is no different. If a player ever collects a second card with the same-color splotch, both cards are discarded.Īfter ten rounds, players add the face value of their cards and score one additional point for every five firefly tokens they have and lose one point for every teardrop.
Once all players have claimed a card, a new round begins with one card turned up for each player.Ĭards are valued -5 through 6, and some cards also have a splotch of color on the upper-left corner. Once a player claims a card, that player is out of the round. On a player’s turn, a player must either place one firefly on the lowest-valued card or claim a card with a firefly on it, taking the fireflies into their personal stash. If it is a player’s turn and that player has no fireflies and there are no cards with fireflies, the player takes a tear token and places a firefly on the lowest-valued card. The deck is shuffled, and one card per player is revealed and placed in ascending order. Each player receives six firefly tokens, which they are allowed to conceal.
To begin, cards are removed for each player up to five not in the game. The players use fireflies to lure the creatures back. Players have captured creatures, and these creatures have escaped. Smile is a bidding/speculation game for three to five players. Keep a stiff upper lip and try not to cry, and maybe you’ll walk away with all the animals you’ve come for…if they don’t scare each other off, of course. Unfortunately, this applies across the board, both to your prized pets and to the feral creatures of the forest. (Apparently you need to work on taming them not to pry open their cage bars next time.) Thankfully, you have a stock of fireflies on hand, and it is proven fact that creatures like nothing more than fireflies. Somehow all the beautiful creatures you’ve been carefully taming have escaped.
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