Game Review: Poo

By Jeremy Anderson

Type/Time/Players: Poo is a card game designed to play "fast and furious," lasting about five to fifteen minutes. It is for 2 to 8 players, though several of the cards become boring with only two.

The Skinny: There are too many easy jokes to make about a game in which monkeys throw poo at one another. The players are the monkeys. The cards say how many "points" worth of poo they hit the other monkeys with. There are cards representing blocks and dodges, and quick dips in a pool to clean off. If you take 15 points of poo, you lose; last monkey who can stand the smell wins.

The Good: Let's give credit for an amusing theme, shall we? Given that, mechanically, this is a last-man-standing brawl with players firing furiously at one another, it would have been easy to design one more game in the ever-popular (and perhaps over-used) medieval or space battle genres. Instead, we have a game that is hard to even talk about without laughing. While it's a bit embarrassing, there is something positive about that.
The art is high-quality and child-safe. As long as it did not include card text, you could post any of the card art on the wall of your cubicle and it would not get you into trouble.
Poo also sports a mechanic that is so simple and obvious that I'm shocked I haven't seen it everywhere else. To avoid drawn-out combo chains or counter-effect wars, a lot of cards simply include the text, "...and he can't do anything about it." Easy. Done.

The Bad: The art, while well-rendered and internally consistent, feels like a mismatch with the game. There's something almost robotically clean about these monkeys; They look like cartoon animals that do not poop.
Poo requires a large number of counters; up to 14 per player. No counters are included with the game. They recommend you use chocolate chips, which seems at first like a hilariously good idea - so very apropos - but a game meant to be played so quickly as this one is likely to result in warm hands, which in turn will result in a real and actual brown mess as a result of the simulated brown mess. So central a part of the game shouldn't have been a place to cut costs.
Poo is to be played back and forth, any given turn taking no more than five seconds. That means both that the strategy involved is extremely simplistic and luck-based, and that the interrelations of the cards should be kept totally intuitive. Unfortunately, they weren't. The ways some cards interact can be amazingly complex, and there's no real call for it.

Conclusions: As tempting as it was to say so, Poo is not a crappy game, nor a stinker. It was relatively fun, and exactly what I was looking for when I had just a little time to fill, a few friends who had been drinking, and an interest in trying something new. It's not much fun with two players, which means that as a game with a "last man standing" setup you always spend the last portion of the game playing a game that's not much fun. But that first bit, with more players, is a simple rowdy romp, an outlet for people to yell "splat!" and so on and smear each other in a way that (hopefully) does not result in an actual smelly mess to clean up.