We finally got a chance to play one of my new games this evening. We ran out of time to play a few learning rounds of Memoir ’44 so we broke out Coloretto. I had read through the rules once before hand and we were able to get up and running in about 5 minutes. The game plays very quickly and is extremely light; about in the same league as 6-Nimmt. There are 9 chameleons in 7 colors, some +2 cards and 3 wild cards. Each player starts with a card of a different color face up in their play area. You never hold cards in your hand.
In the middle of the table is the draw pile and a row of ‘row indicator’ cards (the same number of cards as players). Each turn a player either draws and lays the card in a row (max 3 cards in the row) or takes all the cards in a row (min 1 card) along with the row indicator card (and sits out the rest of the round). The round progresses until all rows have been taken by the remaining players.
The 16th from the last card in the deck is always the ‘end of round’ card (a special card with an arrow on it) and when the last row is taken after this card is drawn, the game ends.
At game end you, assign wilds cards to your one or more of your top three colors, compare the number of your top three colors of matching chameleons against the ‘point chart’ (plus any +2 cards) to arrive at your score. You then take the non-highest colored chameleons and substract the points shown by the point chart to then arrive at your final score. The player with the most points after four games is the winner. Ties remain just that…ties.
We liked the game but I suspect it will only see the table during road trips and things like that but it does provide some semi-mindless fun.