Review – dnup

One of my favorite times of the year is when the nominees for Germany’s “Board Game Oscars,” the Spiel des Jahres, are announced. There are always several new games I’d never heard of before, and in 2022, one of the standouts was Scout, the first nomination from a Japanese game designer. Kei Kajino’s ladder-climbing game had cards with different numbers on top and bottom, allowing players to occasionally flip cards the other way. He’s gone back to this idea in a new card game, dnup, whose original run as Revolve! was licensed and renamed by Space Cowboys. Does dnup stand on its own, or live in Scout‘s shadow? Let’s take a look!

First, I have to say that this is the most impressed I’ve been with Space Cowboys in a long time. When their first three titles were released (Elysium, Splendor, Black Fleet), I was floored by the production values of this new company. It’s not that they’ve done a bad job since, but that surprise was no longer there. Yet, for a small $15 card game, dnup is really well done. The game box has a “hanging tag” that is removable from the box, rather than an easily destroyed tuck box like so many versions of UNO have. The cards feel great. They’re large, dual-indexed, pre-shuffled, and clearly differentiate between the top and bottom numbers. Honestly, I knew you could make dnup with two Scout decks, so I immediately tried to do the opposite (sadly, it doesn’t work). My only “complaint” would be that I find the letter tokens for scoring a little ridiculous, and just having a single type of VP token would have been better. 

As for the gameplay itself, there is basically no point in making this review anything but a comparison to Scout. They are by the same designer, and both use cards that have a “top” and “bottom” number, and involve flipping your hand. Scout is one of my favorite games of all time, so rather than viewing dnup independently, my question is simply this: if you own Scout, should you get dnup? And sadly my answer is no, because the game is just okay, while Scout is amazing.

The games do admittedly have a lot of differences: there are four actions in dnup instead of two, you can rotate your hand mid-round, it’s entirely about sets (no runs), you can rearrange your hand, and the scoring is quite different. But frankly, all those things are bad! 

First, I’ve heard several reviews say that dnup is easier to teach, and I find that ridiculous. There’s an important thing to note here: it’s not just about knowing the rules, but knowing what to do in a quite fast-paced game. The fact that Scout forces you to avoid rearranging your hand and forbids mid-round rotation actually makes it easier to play, because you know what you’ve got at all times. It takes a lot of experience to know when to rotate a hand in dnup or when to do the very strange action of taking someone’s entire set upside-down into your hand (since the point is to go out of cards). 

However, the more important thing to me is that when Scout is going “bad,” it still feels good, while dnup can be really frustrating. In Scout, if you can’t (or don’t want to) beat someone’s meld, the Scout action takes a card from their set, weakening it, but allowing you to place it anywhere in your hand to “fix” your sets and runs, improving your odds for the rest of the round. In dnup, there are many times when your turn just sucks. You have the perfect three-card set, then someone plays a higher one, forbidding you from playing (all of) it. Or, you think your hand is unbeatable, only to have it sent back to your hand, upside-down, ruining the rest of the round. There is some interesting early strategy where you might “limp out” bad sets early in order to get them flipped, but it sucks in the back half of the round. And the worst one: you’re down to a single card, but can’t play it, and are forced to rotate your hand to make the card even worse, while other players finish up and win the round. Even the scoring is bad – the 2 points / 1 point system makes it so you can end up with a final round where someone has no chance of winning (e.g. two players have 3 points and the third player has 0 points, when the game is first to 4 points. Even if the 0-point player wins the round, one of the other two will get 1 point for second place and win). 

Honestly, if dnup didn’t look so good, I probably would not give it another glance. I’ve tried to find the “better” game in it, with 25 plays of it between in-person and BoardGameArena. One positive I’ll give it is that the two-player rules are very good, and far more fun than Scout. But if it’s just me and one other player, we’re probably playing a “real” two-player game, like Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth, Star Wars Deckbuilding Game, or any of the dozens of “duo” games that have been released in the past two years.  If someone wanted me to play this with them, I’d indulge them… but then I’d teach them Scout.