Tonight, for our family fun time, we played No Thanks! This is a quick card game where players have to choose between taking a card, which can give you bad points, or paying a chip, which is worth a good point in the end. I think the first time I had played the game was on boardgamearena.com, and the box art there calls it No Merci and it looked a bit like 6 Nimmt, which is sometimes known as Take 6. The two games are similar, but definitely different enough to want both in your game collection.
One reason why you might like this game over 6 Nimmt/Take 6, is the time frame. In our 30-minute window that we had, we managed to play the game twice with 6 players, so each game was a little less than 15 minutes.
I started the game both times, as the instructions mentioned - the oldest begins the game. Clockwise around the table sat Beth, Janai, Isaac, Anna, and Grace. The first card was pretty high, mid-20s, so I paid a chip to say "No Thanks!" It got around the table a couple times before Beth took it with a decent amount of chips on it. I think the next card was in the 30s, I think it was 32, so that went around the table even more before Isaac decided to grab it and the pile of chips. He thought he was going to take all the high cards, but at one point I decided to grab the 31, which shocked Isaac, but there were plenty of chips on it and I was starting to run low at that point. Grace was upset that she was running out of chips, but she hadn't taken any cards until everyone else had and when it did happen, she managed to pick up just enough chips to keep her from needing to grab very many more. She got a run or two along with a low card and ended up winning the first game of the night. Our second game was similar, but we had some good laughs when Beth was trying to help Janai with some strategy and encouraged her to put a chip on a card that she was considering taking just to be able to get some more chips when other people were not likely to take the cards... however, both times, Beth happened to have a card that was next in the sequence which is very helpful for scoring in the end. She denies noticing that she had the card, but when it got around to her, she realized once that she actually really wanted that card herself, and then another time when she tried to give Janai a helpful suggestion, one of the other girls ended up grabbing the card because of being out of chips... and Beth also had a card in the sequence, so Beth might have wanted it anyway once she realized what she had. We joked and laughed about it, but I'm sure Beth really just was innocent.
Overall, good fun, quick game, and it can end up giving out plenty of laughs and groans when someone ends up with something other than what they wanted.
