Parade Card Game Review

Year Published: 2007

Players: 2-6

Playing Time: 45 Minutes

The introductory text for this one is a source of accidental humor. There’s a bit of a story about a Parade happening in Wonderland, but then it gets pouty about people leaving the parade when others show up, and why can’t everyone just get along?! Yadda yadda…

But this whole thing is just a traditional-style card game. I adore it; this is a positive review. But trying to graft a legitimate theme onto it is a bit nonsensical. The closest it gets to thematic integration is that it feels intuitive to call the card line a “parade” during gameplay. Beyond that, though, it’s all just window dressing.

But I digress.

Parade is a card game for 2-6 players that plays in under an hour. In it, players will accumulate cards in one of six suits by placing a card on the end of the parade-line, counting that many cards inward, then taking from the remaining cards those that are equal to or less than the value you played, plus any of the same suit that you played.

You don’t actually want cards. They’re negative points, essentially (or lowest score wins if you say that you accumulate positive points). But if you have the most of a single suit at the end, you can flip them over so that they each only count for 1 point instead of their card value, which could truck you for as many as -10 points.

There are a few other wrinkles, but I basically just taught you the game. It’s not complicated.

Freedom and Restriction in Cardplay

So you don’t want cards in your personal tableau…unless you have the most of a suit. But the game’s rules will necessitate that you take some. And occasionally it will be in a suit you’re not competing for.

This is good, because it forces hard choices. There’s a delicious, groaning tension in games where there’s often no best choice for you, simply varying degrees of “bad.”

However, your freedom within the simple structure is considerable. I’ve seen card-heavy strategies win, as well as card-avoidance strategies. And because you’ll rarely be hemmed into a single option, you can sort of dictate which of these (or a hybrid thereof) that you want to follow. Your play isn’t dictated by your draw, but rather by how you want to manipulate the board and how high your risk tolerance is.

The other delightful result of the system is that there’s no “best” card all of the time. Sure, high numbers (9s and 10s) will allow you to avoid cards and tend to be coveted, but there will be a point at which you want those three cards of a particular suit, and maybe the 5 of that suit is the perfect card too allow you to deny them from two of your rivals.

The fact that any card can potentially be the “right” card for the situation is something that few other card games possess. Many try to do this, sure. They’ll have some weird rule where the lowest number beats the highest, or some similar twist. But here, it’s an organic system that naturally produces a lot of “right” choices rather than having to manufacture them artificially.

The Banal in Simplicity

I have a friend who doesn’t like this one, and it’s because he sees the decisions in it as perfunctory. Do the obvious thing, then wait for your turn to come back around.

I was flummoxed by this momentarily until I remembered the sessions he played of it, wherein he was dealt an extremely good hand for card avoidance. He simply played high numbers and kept very few.

This didn’t work for him at least once, and I won with a card-hoarding strategy (I flipped pretty much all of my cards at the end, turning them into 1 negative point each instead of far more), so it seemed odd to me that he’d think of this one as a single-strategy game without meaningful decisions.

But it also showed me that if someone sees a valid path that is always the same basic strategy, a game’s decision space can seem to shrink to nothing. This can happen in any game with enough (lack of) creativity. But my friend doesn’t lack for creative imagination in games. So I think the potential issue lies in the fact that, yes, Parade is pretty simple in its rules structure, and a game can occur here or there where your decisions occasionally feel automatic as a result of this.

I personally see some long-term strategy in building a tableau of cards while also retaining the right cards to avoid poor draws on future turns, and to bank cards that you’ll flip over at endgame to add to your tableau. It’s not the deepest of games even with these considerations. But it does take your decisions slightly beyond the immediate options in front of you. The fact that I’ve seen winners with the most and least cards in their tableau (and winners somewhere in the middle of this spread) means that the correct play is situational, which is how the best card games should be.

For me, that’s more than enough. But you’re still just picking a card and playing it, and at times there will only be so many good options; perhaps only one!

I enjoy juxtapositions of experience like this, though, so I tell this story of my friend not to say he’s wrong but to delineate between our approaches and opinions.

Player Count Problems

This is a 2-6 player game. But I’m going to take a small bit of wind out of those sails: it should really only be a 2-4 player game.

This is not truly a knock against the game, because I think it absolutely sings at those player counts. But if you’re hoping for a good 6P affair, this ain’t it.

The issue is that it doesn’t scale the number of cards to players, so you simply have fewer actions and are more reactionary at higher player counts.

This is one of my top pulls at 3P (and I also love it at two and four), maybe the single most frequent pull I make at that player count. If a game fills a small niche but is best-in-class, or nearly so, at that player count, it’s doing better than most games on the market. Adjust your interest accordingly.

Join the Parade

Worst-case scenario here is still a pretty benign risk. The game is small, cheap (unless out of print), easy to teach and plays quickly.

And the potential upside to its quirky gameplay? It could end up being one of the better card games in your collection, even collections with numerous such offerings. As a devoted fan of traditional-style card games, and those adjacent like Parade, this is right up there with the best of them for me, and I hope it’s discovered by many others.