Groo: The Game

Box cover of Basic Game, artwork by Sergio Aragonés, 1997

Groo: The Game is a card game published by Archangel Studios in 1997 that is based on the comic book Groo the Wanderer by Sergio Aragonés.

Description

In Groo: The Game, 2–4 players vie to build a large town.

Components

The Basic Game contains:

• 60 cards, which include Groo Effects, Events, Buildings (each with a certain number of Victory Points), Troops, Wildcards, and one Groo card
• 7 blank six-sided dice, and stickers to be applied to the dice
• rule book

The game expansion published in 1997 contains 55 more cards.

Setup

Each player is dealt five cards.

Gameplay

Each turn, the active player may, if they wish

1. Discard cards
2. Draw enough cards to bring hand to five cards
3. Make one attack

The active player then MUST

• Roll the dice to determine where Groo goes, and what resources the player receives
• Allot the received resources
• Pass any unused resources to the player on the left, who uses any and passes the remainder to the left, and so on.
• If the active player has less than five cards, they draw enough to bring their hand back to five.

Victory conditions

The first player to build a town with buildings worth seven Victory Points or more is the winner.

Publication history

The first Groo the Wanderer comic by Sergio Aragonés appeared in the pages of Destroyer Duck #1 in 1981. In 1997, Aragonés and Ken Whitman designed Groo: The Game, which was published by Archangel Studios. An expansion set of 55 more cards was also released in 1997.

Reception

Marcelo Figueroa of Shadis referred to the game as "one of the coolest cards games I've ever played".

Groo: The Game was reviewed in Pyramid #28 (Nov 1997), which said "Good news to both Groo fans and Groo novices is that this is an excellent game. While not a collectible card game, there is already one expansion set, which is also highly recommended."

In Issue 8 of Backstab, the magazine's editor, Croc, noted that fans of the Groo comics would love the game, and that "most of the drawings are hilarious and very descriptive of the cards' effects." But overall Croc was not impressed, giving it a very poor rating of only 4 out of 10 and saying, "Groo is a nice game to pass a little time, but doesn't contain enough content to become a classic."