UNO Spin

UNO is one of those card games that I have efficiently avoided for many years.

Having decided early on that it was ‘snap for babies’, I happily went on with my life ignoring its appearance on the last day of primary school, bypassing it on Xbox Live Arcade, and skipping it on the mobile gaming portals.

The addition of a spinner, however, sounds like it could create an intriguing new layer on the basic gameplay, so I went into UNO Spin with high hopes that maybe it could be at least slightly engaging.

It doesn’t take long to get the hang of the rules for UNO. While it isn’t exactly ‘snap for babies’ as I incorrectly assumed from the large numbers on the cards, it isn’t particularly hard to grasp either.

The idea is to get rid of all the cards in your hand first by playing them, one player at a time, onto a discard pile. If no matching colour or number can be played, the player has to draw another card and put it in their hand.

There’s a number of special cards in the deck that do a variety of mean things like add extra cards to the next player’s hand or skip their go, so games move quickly and feel competitive.

The twist, as it were, with UNO Spin is that there is now also a spinner, brought into play when certain marked cards are discarded.

This spinner is filled with both negative and positive actions that the next player must undertake, ranging from ‘keep picking up cards until you get a red one’ to ‘discard all cards bar two’.

In fact, that latter one, called ‘Almost UNO’ and the highly annoying ‘swap hands left’ can be so overpowered that an easily winnable game, or well-played hand, can suddenly become a loss through no fault of your own.

Making the unpredictable nature of the spinner more bearable is the frankly huge range of unlockable items and tournaments to play through.

Each stage has its own interpretation of the rules – from allowing people to ‘jump in’ to forcing a player to draw cards until they can play one – and each adds a subtle difference to how the game pans out.

The graphics remind me strongly of the Xbox 360 version of the game, right down to the pyrotechnics when a round is won and the suspiciously avatar-looking characters that can be customised to the hilt.

The great graphics, length, variety, and base gameplay of UNO Spin managed to easily overcome my misplaced preconceptions of the game. Yet while the UNO part was refreshingly entertaining, it was ironically the Spin I ended up desperate to avoid.