Viewpoint Revisioned: A Card Game of One-Eyed Aliens and 'Take That'

A science experiment gone wrong finds you lost across dimensions. Build up points to win the game and make your way home.

Published by 93 Made Games, Viewpoint Revisioned is a 5-30 minute card game designed for 2-6 players.

Gameplay

The deck is shuffled and each player draws five cards. On your turn you draw a card, play a card, perform any actions from the card you played, and then your turn ends.

Played cards go into your personal face-up display in front of you: this is your personal field of view. Each card also has a point value (negative or positive). If the point value of all the cards in your field of view equals 100 or more at the end of your turn, you win the game.

Actions on cards often involve other players’ hands, or the cards in their fields of view. Some cards also have reveal abilities that you can play on another player’s turn in response to an action they perform. For example, if they play a card to make everyone else discard one card from their hands, you might have a card you can reveal to stop that action from occurring. Reveal cards typically have a second action that you can use on your turn by playing the card instead of using its reveal ability.

Review

Viewpoint Revisioned is very light, with lots of back and forth take-that elements and plenty of good-old-fashioned luck of the draw. You can bluff, you can hold back certain high scoring cards to try and steal a win late in the game, there are defensive cards you can hold onto, you can steal from opponents, you can collect cards that allow you to play twice or draw twice...there’s just a large range of abilities and effects across the cards. There are small, clever additions, such as when you take a card from a player’s hand you get to look at all their cards and choose one, rather than taking a card at random. Touches like these allow the game to have very familiar gameplay, while also putting its own twist on it.

The rules are very, very simple. They’re easy to teach and learn, and the win condition is straightforward. This is a great, casual card game to play with people who don’t typically play a lot of card games — it’s really fast, light, and enjoyable.

There are, at the time of writing this review, three expansions that can be played as standalone games, shuffled together, or shuffled with the base deck. Each one adds small, new mechanics and each comes with a unique theme and advances the story.

While the story of the game doesn’t really affect gameplay, it does provide Viewpoint Revisioned with a lot of character and the artwork is bright, colorful, and unique. It definitely adds to the pleasure of playing the game and sets it apart.

Player count will increase game time, so that’s worth keeping in mind, and we probably wouldn’t recommend this with the full count of six players.

If you like fast, easy card games, Viewpoint Revisioned is a very enjoyable entry in the genre. We were surprised by how much we enjoyed it and there’s enough strategy mixed in there to keep the game from feeling random.

Pros: Theme and artwork, card abilities, player interaction, game speed

Cons: Game length is a little on the long side for a game of this size when you get to the higher player count

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.