Aquarius has been around since 1998, and now has a second edition, which has much improved the game. Aquarius is an excellent family game, a very colourful kid’s game and a calm chilled out filler game. It doesn’t get as much ‘filler’ play at our club simply due to the amount of gaming options that we have collectively, including Saboteur, Poo, Escalation and Coloretto.

Aquarius is now different, appearance wise it comes in a box with a lid instead of a playing card style packet with a flap. It is still handy to carry, but is also durable, which is important as like any decent card game the packet type box starts to fall apart after a while.  When we broke out the cards we quickly found out that this new edition is pretty much the same game but also different.

Is it worth picking up the new Aquarius if you already have it? Well yes, pick up the new version and spread the love by giving your old copy to a friend! Why? Well, the game includes a ‘Wild Card’, which was originally only available as a promo with another Looney Labs game. The Wild Card counts as all five elements all of the time, it can be a game breaker, and more often than not is moved around the board during the course of the game to advantage one player or  another.

The reason for the usefulness of the Wild Card is that most of the cards have one or more ‘elements’ on them, from the selection of fire, earth, water, air and night sky. The cards are halved, quartered or have just one element, so you place the cards on the table contiguously to each other so that the elements match. When seven cards are linked to each other by a chain of the same element, the player whose ‘goal’ is to link a chain of that element wins the game.

The halved cards are split across the middle on the long sides, and also split from one corner to the opposite corner. Once you start laying the cards it feels a bit like dominoes (in a good way), as the cards are so colourful with rainbows on the air cards and flowers on the earth cards. It also plays pretty quickly, as you pick up a card and play one, so you usually have enough options.

The goals are dealt out to each player at the start of the game and are kept secret, so you are effectively trying to guess what each others goals are, and trying to block them with awkward cards. In a five player game this can easily lead to a stalemate, and a two player game can be a bit dull, so I would say that the ideal player count is three to four. With less than five players, the spare goals are set aside, which leads to a little more second guessing about who has what goal. 

In addition to the ‘element’ cards, there are a bunch of action cards that allow you to mess with your opponents. You can Trade Hands (of cards) with another player, Trade Goals with another player, Zap a Card (remove it from the table and place it in your hand) or Move a Card (move a card on the table to another legal position). There is also Shuffle Hands (of cards) and Rotate Goals (clockwise or counter clockwise).

These last two are where the second edition varies from the original, as there used to be Shuffle Goals, which was usually irritating in that it generally destroyed any real player strategy. I have played too many games, especially in five player games, where three Shuffle Goals are played at the end of the game and you wonder why you bother playing. Even if you win through such card play, it doesn’t feel like winning. 

There is also a new rule. If you lay a card that matches more than one element, you draw additional cards depending on how many elements are matched together. This makes Aquarius more challenging, because those extra cards give you more choices and definitely make it worth your while looking for multiple matches. The only drawback is that it takes away an element of the casual play from Aquarius, because some players don’t see the patterns in the cards.