Smile & Like It

Smile and Like It is a family-friendly card game for 3 - 8 players with a unique twist. On your turn, play a card and do what it says, simple as that. Generally the card will instruct you to claim chips (some face up, some face down, all of which have smiley faces of differing levels of happiness on one side) from the center pot, trade chips you've already collected with other players, and so on.

Here's the twist: you don't automatically get to draw a card at the end of your turn. Instead, you have to claim a special "draw" chip (differently colored than all the other chips in the pot) and have it remain in your score pile until your next turn, at which point you can replenish your hand of cards... but that's all you can do on that turn. Of course, there aren't enough draw chips in the pot for everyone.

So the tension builds: how long do you dare wait to take the draw chip? If you run out of cards, you lose chips from your pot to the players seated on either side of you... but if you happen to have a draw chip in your score pile at the end of the game, you take a massive penalty to your final score.

The game comes with three unique methods of scoring right in the box. One scoring system simply gives more points for happier smiley faces (very family friendly), one scores points for sets of different types of smileys (a bit more strategic, but still family friendly), and one uses patterns of smileys printed right on the cards, giving the players another option on how to play a card: playing it as a scoring card by spending the specific pattern of smileys in the score pile (introducing a hand management aspect to the game suitable for more hardcore gamers).

All in all, Smile and Like It is a game that is simple to learn and play, and yet difficult to master in any of its incarnations, making it a game you'll come back to again and again.