We finished of with R-Eco, a quick card game by Susumu Kawasaki and published by Z-Man Games. The game is about the virtues of recycling and the evils of dumping waste.

The cards represent four types of waste and each type has a disposal facility. On their turn, players get to add cards of one type to the corresponding disposal facility and if the total equals or exceeds four, these get removed and the player gets a reward. However, each facility also has a dump site and the player also has to take all the cards from the dump site into their hand. However, a player can only have a maximum of five cards in hand and any excess has to be illegally dumped (for negative points). More cards then get added to the dump site for future turns. Once all eight rewards from one of the dump sites has been claimed, the game ends and the rewards are counted, but they must have at least two reward counters of a particular waste type for them to count. Illegal dumping penalties are deducted and a bonus is given for someone who does not illegally dump at all. Most points wins.

This was a nice light filler, although some felt the choices to be obvious and turns were driven purely by what cards turned up in the dump sites. To me, there was some angst in getting your timing right and although the decisions were not too brain taxing, weighing up whether or not to illegally dump to get the cards you really needed was an interesting dilemma. Mark G made it two wins for the night by getting several reward tokens without the need to illegally dump. Although I did manage to get more rewards, the three cards I dumped tipped the balance in Mark’s favour.