Someone was brandishing a deck of Star Wars Top Trump cards at me over the weekend, with every intention of playing it with the given rules, but luckily I had the presence of mind to try the Yahtzee hybrid, which I’ve been percolating quietly since I posted it here.

And it worked much better than I expected. The game itself is still fairly trivial, gambling on the odds that a given random card will beat other random cards, but there turned out to be a lot of humour in the mission narrative - developing little metaphorical representations of scenes that fit the deck’s theme (or were in its film), and seeing how randomly-dealt characters cope with it. Turning over your last card to see who you’re going to have to assign to the high-Dark-Side three-token “torturer” role, and getting an Ewok. Being proud that your Skeleton makes quite a good two-token “head” body-part for your Frankenstein’s monster.

I’ve written the rules up. Am wondering whether the “everyone play simultaneously” mechanic needs tightening to stop people watching and waiting too much (that this didn’t happen when testing it, because nobody was playing fiercely strategically), that a one-token bonus for finishing first might cure that. It works as it is, though.