Illusion Card Game – Are My Eyes Deceiving Me? | Review

In the Illusion card game you have to look very closely, sort colours and soon ask yourself the question: Are my eyes deceiving me?.

How much colour do you really see?

This slogan is on the cover of the Illusion card game and winds around a colourful, irregularly patterned question mark. A card game that is all about illusion, seeing and recognising and that immediately challenges me to test my sense of sight. And that of some of the other players.

Brightly coloured, confused shapes and sophisticated patterns. When opening the Illusion card game, it quickly becomes clear what is meant by the sentence “How much colour can you really see? It is a guessing game in which the aim is to estimate how much area of the card a certain colour takes up.

The Illusion card game is great as a travel game or for quick, short rounds of play, for example, while waiting for food in a restaurant with impatient children or on a train journey. The rules are easy and quick to learn, and all you have to do to prepare for the game is shuffle the cards. So you can start almost immediately without any preparation. The only drawback: you need space to lay out the cards!

Note on transparency: The Nuremberg Spielkarten-Verlag provided us with a review copy of the Illusion card game free of charge. However, this review is unpaid and reflects our independent opinion.

Illusion Card Game at a Glance

• Game type: Family game, Legs game, Card game
• Age: 8 years and up
• Players: 2-5 players
• Duration: approx. 15 minutes
• Publisher: Nuremberg Playing Cards Publishers
• Author: Wolfgang Warsch
• Year of publication: 2018
• Game objective: Place cards printed with colourful patterns in turn according to the percentage of a particular colour in the correct order and collect points.

Angebot

NSV - 4057 - ILLUSION - Kartenspiel

98 Farbkarten, 12 Pfeilkarten, 1 Spielanleitung; Spieldauer: ca. 15 Min.; Spieler: 2-5 - Alter: ab 8 Jahren

9,20 EUR

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Estimating Colours in the Illusion Card Game

Illusion card game – where does the card belong?

The Illusion card game consists of two different types of cards: the 12 plain arrows in different colours and the 98 colourful patterned cards.

At the beginning, you shuffle arrow cards and patterned cards separately and place the arrows face down in a pile in the middle. For each round of the game, an arrow is turned face up, indicating which colour is important in that round.

Game setup at the beginning of the round Illusion

The other cards are placed next to them as a second pile with the coloured side facing up. The first card is laid out to start. Now a draw is made to see who gets to start and the first player takes the top card from the pile and tries to estimate how big the percentage of the colour indicated by the arrow is on the card surface.

If, in his opinion, the percentage is higher, he places the card under the card already on display; if it is lower, he places it on top. Then it is the next player’s turn, clockwise, to place his card in the correct position in the row.

Putting cards in order in the Illusion card game

This continues until one player says aloud, “I doubt”, thus doubting the correctness of the entire row. Now he turns the cards over to the back – there are the percentages of the respective colours on them – and it turns out whether the order was laid correctly.

The percentages are on the back

If the doubter was right and there was a mistake in the order, he gets to take the arrow card. If the order is correct, the player in front of him gets the arrow card.

The used cards are removed from the game, a new arrow card is drawn and a new pattern card is laid out and the series starts again.

The winner is the player who has collected the most arrows at the end – or alternatively whoever has 3 arrow cards first.

Evaluation and Conclusion

Rating

Illusion is a guessing game for which you also need good eyes. If there are only one or two cards on the table, it is easy to classify your card. But the more cards you have, the more difficult it becomes.

Usually there are no more than 7-9 cards on the table and then it is quite difficult to classify the new card and you start to doubt your own perception. When mistakes crept in, they were usually in the 1-3% range, only rarely was a card completely wrong. I suspect that the more often you play the Illusion card game  the more your perception of the surfaces in relation to each other and to other shapes is trained.

The cards show completely different patterns to make guessing more difficult: Lines, letters, clouds, squiggles, squares, hearts, circles, stars, rhombuses, etc. This constantly challenges the sense of sight and the Illusion card game never gets boring and can be played in countless variations. I don’t believe that anyone learns the percentages on the back by heart and thus thwarts the fun of the game 😉

We have played the card game with three and four players and classify it as an entertaining family game where young and old are on an equal footing.

In my opinion, it’s perfect for a long train ride, to pass the time in the park with a few quick rounds of cards or even as a prelude to a game night.

The cards are printed in bold colours and are of high quality – only time will tell if they will still be as beautiful after 10 years.

Conclusion

Correctly guessing how much colour you see is harder than you think! Practice doesn’t make perfect in this card game and adults have no advantage over children. Entertaining card game for the park, quickly understood and easy to play! 

Have you heard of the lauded telepathic card game The Mind? Stay up to date with our game tips on Discoveries You Should Know. There’s much more on Abenteuer Freundschaft: for example, lots of inspiration for gifts and activities with kids, your partner and friends!

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