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Uno 52 is a video game version of Uno for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. Like other Uno games for the two systems, Uno 52 was developed by Black Lantern Studios and published by DSI Games and/or Zoo Digital Publishing depending on your region. This game's twist is how it combines the mechanics of Uno with that of Poker. In general, you spend your turns playing cards to the discard pile like in regular Uno, before playing a card to your Poker hand afterwards. Uno 52 also has special modes that put different twists on the main gameplay loop, such as endurance mode or timed mode.
Every card, including cards that don't have suits from solitaire mode, and toggleable alt. cards.
An Uno 52 deck consists of 240 cards, with the high amount being partially due to the 0 to 9 numbering system being ditched in favor of the 2 to Ace numbering of a standard playing card deck, and mostly due to cards having colors and suits, requiring 16 of each number instead of the 4 you would expect in either Uno or playing cards. This makes up 208 cards of the deck, with the others being the action cards, a term used to describe the cards that cause an effect(eg. reverse, draw 2, wild, etc.). Neither the effects nor the amounts of the action cards are changed, so they make up the other 32 like normal, rounding off the deck to an even 240.
Gameplay[]
A game of Uno 52 starts the way regular Uno does. A card is given to each player, with the player given the highest value card being the dealer. Action cards are all the lowest value, and aces high. As per usual, the player left of the dealer goes first. The only part of setting up a game to not be in regular Uno is everyone starting with 25 chips, which is how score is measured. At the start of each round, everyone donates one chip to the jackpot(pot for short), before being dealt their usual 7 card hands. But after that, everyone is dealt 5 permanently face up poker hands, which can be changed by you and will influence your score at the end of the round. If an action card is dealt into someone's poker hand, another card is just dealt on top of it to replace it, which can happen multiple times in a row.
When it's your turn, you first do your Uno turn, the part which, as the name suggests, is the most like regular Uno. During your Uno turn you can play a card to the discard pile if its color matches or it's symbol matches. Note that the suits have no effect on card matching, so color and symbol are still the only two ways of matching cards. If you do not or cannot play a card, you must draw. If you can play the card you just drew, you are given the option to do so.[1]
If you did play a card in the Uno half of your turn, you enter the poker half of your turn, (unless you only have one card left after playing, most likely because it would be against the spirit of Uno to go from more than one card left to winning, making saying Uno unnecessary.) In the poker half, you don't play to the discard pile, but instead to one of the cards in your poker hand. Doing so serves the dual purpose of bettering your poker hand (which becomes relevant at the end of the round), and discarding an extra card. Due to usually being able to discard two cards per turn, Uno 52 is much more fast paced than regular Uno. When playing to your poker hand, you still can only play to a card of your poker hand if it matches color or symbol, like normal, but it additionally must not be an action card. You may also skip your poker turn by using the blue skip button that replaces the draw pile, allowing you to not play to your poker hand. Skipping is the only option if you can't play any of your cards to your poker hand.
Like in other Game Boy Advance or Nintendo DS uno games, you need to press a button to call uno before you play a card, and pressing it during the card playing animation will not work. If you fail to do so, someone will be able to challenge you, and force you to draw two cards, which differs from the rule in regular Uno that states you need to draw 4 cards.[2]
If you start your turn with only 1 card left, you can play to the discard pile or your poker hand, and must draw if you can't do either. This addition makes having one card left even more of a uniquely threatening spot than it is in regular Uno, due to the fact that the color of the discard pile matters less. This also nerfs action cards(besides wilds and wild draw fours), as those can't be played to your poker hand, so keeping one for too long can ruin your chances of winning.
Like in regular Uno, the round ends when someone runs out of cards, but in Uno 52, the scoring system is now vastly different, required, and based around chips. Firstly, everyone with cards left gives a chip to the jackpot for each card left. Secondly, the player who ran out of cards first gets a blue chip worth 10 chips as a prize, and the player who had the best poker hand gets a red chip worth 5 chips. Lastly, if one player does both in the same round, they also get all of the chips in the jackpot. A results screen is shown afterwards to show you relevant statistics, such as each player's amount of Uno wins, or how many chips each player has.
Game Modes[]
In the main menu, the "quick play", "custom game", and "special modes" buttons can be seen.[3] Custom game has the most configurability and options, but it does lack a few settings that are seen in other DS or Game Boy Advanced games. Quick play, as the name suggests, has less configurable options, but fits all of the remaining ones into a single menu(not counting the song and background selection that appears before a game no matter what), so that starting a game is faster. Special modes opens up a menu with more options, showing the four special modes: challenge, endurance, timed, and solitaire mode.
Quick Play[]
In quick play, you can pick the amount of human players, the amount of CPU players(and the difficulty thereof), and the game type. The game types start with endless, where the game doesn't end unless you quit, and the results screen shows pot wins, uno wins, poker wins, and chips. Secondly is the chips game type, where the winner is the first to reach 500 chips in the Game Boy Advance version, and 100 in the Nintendo DS version, and only showing chips in the results screen. The next three are Uno wins, poker wins, and pot wins, which declare the winner when someone reaches 3 of the selected type of win, and only show the amount of that win each player has in the results screen. Lastly is the most complicated: survival mode. In survival everyone starts with 50 chips in the Nintendo DS version, and 100 in the Game Boy Advance version. No one donates chips to the pot either, but instead -15 chips is distributed as evenly as possible across everyone(to cancel out the total of 15 won at the end of the round), and the lost chips don't go to the jackpot. Because of this, the jackpot only gets filled by people donating a chip to it for each card left at the end of the round. If you aren't in the middle of a round, and your chips are at 0 or negative, you are eliminated from the game. The win condition is to be the last one standing.
Custom Game[]
Custom game is much the same, but starts with determining the amount of total players, and optionally using teams mode if the amount is the maximum of 4. Afterwards you pick which ones are humans and which ones are CPUs(and CPU difficulty if there are any). Then you choose the game type like normal, but with more customization. Endless is the same, but chips lets you choose the chips win condition from a minimum of 50 to a maximum of 500, in multiples of 25. Uno/Poker/Pot wins now lets you choose the amount of wins you need from 1 to 10, and survival now lets you choose the starting chips from a minimum of 50 in the Game Boy Advance version, 25 in the Nintendo DS version, and a maximum of 500 in both versions. In the same menu as the game mode and game mode option, you can also enable "house rules" and "alt. cards", which, if enabled, each have their own menus before you get to the game.
House Rules[]
The house rules menu's first option is to let you play a wild card(specifically a wild, wild draw 4 or other wild action cards don't count) on a poker hand to change the color of the card you play it on. This rule replaces what would be the infinite draw option in other Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS Uno games, which would make it so that if you draw a card you can't play, then you have to keep drawing until you get one you can and choose to play it. The next house rule is an option to enable or disable draw 2 stacking. The third lets you change the penalty you pay for getting called out for forgetting to say uno. This ranges from drawing 0 cards(which doesn't disable the mechanic, just makes challenging pointless) to drawing 5 cards. The fourth lets you change the amount of cards you start with, from 5 cards to 15 cards. The fifth and final option pertains to draw 4 bluffing. The default is to allow you to bluff a draw 4 by playing it when you could've matched by color(called "bluff on"), but you may also not allow you to bluff by preventing you from playing a wild draw 4 if you can match by color("bluff off"), and an option to disable the mechanic and make playing a wild draw 4 possible whenever("anytime").
Alternate Cards[]
The alternate cards menu lets you toggle on or off the wild reverse, wild skip, wild symbol, all draw 2, and the joker. The wild reverse can be played at anytime and lets you choose the color it is, like a wild, and also reverses the turn order and skips in 2 player, like a reverse. The wild skip is much the same, but it skips instead of reversing. Strangely enough, both cards appear to transform into a regular reverse or skip after selecting a color(eg. if you play a wild reverse and select blue, it turns into a blue reverse), which actually has gameplay implications as it means that you can play any reverse by symbol matching to a wild reverse, and it works the same for a wild skip and regular skips. Wild symbol is a card that, like a wild, can be played at any time, but instead of choosing the color to continue play with and having no symbol, you choose the symbol to continue play with, and have no color. Regular numbers can be picked, including the face cards, but the draw 2 symbol, skip symbol, and reverse symbol can also be picked. However, picking the symbol of an action card won't cause its action. The all draw 2 card has 2 of each color, and it forces all other players to draw 2 cards, and skips nobody's turn. In teams mode, only players not on the same team as you will draw 2 cards. If both all draw 2 and wild symbol are enabled, then the wild symbol will be able to select all draw 2 as one of its symbols. The joker comes in 4 colors like the all draw 2, and 1 of each color unlike it. The joker is the only card with no suit that can always be played to your poker hand(since wilds can only be played if you enable the house rule). Jokers are wild cards, in the poker sense of the word and not the Uno way. They are named after the joker cards that bookend the normal 52 cards of a playing card deck, because some variations of poker use them as wild cards that can represent anything. When played to the discard pile it is functionally just a four times rarer number card, but when played to your poker hand, a little visual effect of a jester with a blue hat pops out, laughs, and then disappears. A joker in your poker hand will, when the round ends, be treated as whatever card would be best for your poker hand. For example, if you have 4 spades and a joker in your poker hand, the joker will act like another space, and get you a flush(unless something better is available). The joker card replaces what would be the leader draw 2 card in other Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS Uno games, which if it were there, would make the person with the fewest cards draw 2. With all the custom cards enabled, there is a total of 264 cards in the deck, 24 more than Uno 52's default settings.
Special Modes[]
Game Boy Advance challenge menu
Challenge Mode[]
Starting off the special modes, challenge mode has five premade "challenges", and after that a random challenge button. The 5 challenges are basically preset custom games, and the random challenge button is essentially just a random custom game. In the Nintendo DS version, you need to beat a challenge to unlock the next one, and unlock random challenge after all 5. The first challenge is to run out of cards first against two easy CPU opponents. This challenge mostly depends on luck due to only the Uno win mattering, so it is pretty easy since you can just keep retrying it over and over, and each attempt is only one round long. The odds are in your favor as long as you can perform better than an easy CPU, which isn't much of a task. The second challenge is to get the best poker hand twice, also against two easy opponents. This one is also easy, due to the fact that any CPU plays the same way no matter the context, so you can just ignore the whole Uno part of the game, and draw all the cards you need to try and get the best poker hand. With this strategy, the CPUs are effectively just a timer until the round ends, and usually a long enough one for you to win twice. The third challenge is survival mode against 3 normal difficulty opponents. There isn't much of a cheesy strategy against this one, as survival depends on your chips, but it isn't too hard either as your opponents are normal CPUs. The fourth challenge is also against 3 normal opponents, but this time its to win the pot 3 times. Since the only thing that matters is getting the jackpot, if you know you can't get the Uno win, its better to throw the round by focusing solely on your poker hand, to make sure nobody else can get the pot that round. If you are the only one who can get the jackpot, it doesn't matter how much time you take doing so, as you can't be beaten to the finish line. The fifth challenge is against 3 hard opponents, and the goal is to reach 250 chips. With the goal just being about chips, there is no cheesy strategy to get a win like in challenges 2 and 4. Additionally, you still just start at the normal 25 chips, and with 10 cards each round instead of 7, so this will take quite a while. With the long amount of rounds and higher starting cards, luck has less influence than the small amount it usually has on challenge 5. If you can perform at a level better than a hard CPU for a long time, you can win.
Endurance Mode[]
The next special mode is Endurance mode, where your 2 (3 in the Nintendo DS version) normal difficulty CPU opponents all have infinite chips, but yours are a timer. The way it works is that anything that normally makes you gain chips will instead add to your score, and not increase your chip count, but anything that makes you lose chips will not effect your score and will decrease your chip total. Even with perfect play and luck, you will at most play 25 rounds due to the unavoidable chip loss of donating a chip to the pot at the start of a round, and not getting the uno win a single time means you will play less than that. The goal is to get the highest score possible, and the game ends when you finally run out of chips. Endurance mode massively rewards consistency, as one bad game can massively reduce the amount of time you have left.
Timed Mode[]
The last special mode to play like Uno 52 is Timed mode, in which you play against 1 CPU under the pressure of two time limits. There is a 2:30 round timer that resets each round, and when it goes off, the round immediately ends without the prize for the Uno win being given. There is also a 10:00 game timer that never resets, and when it runs out, the current round stops the same way, and then the game ends. Both players have infinite chips, and any chips that would be gained by you go to your score. The goal is to get the highest score in the limited available time.
Solitaire Mode[]
The final special mode is Solitaire mode. In Solitaire mode, there are no action cards or opponents, and cards don't have suits. It plays like regular Solitaire, except the suits are replaced with colors, it looks like uno cards, and you can put cards on top of each other if their color matches or their number matches. Due to this, it doesn't play much like Uno, Poker, or Uno 52. It is effectively just regular Solitaire, but you match cards by same rank and same suit, and with Uno looking cards.
Development[]
Reception[]
On IGN the Game Boy Advance version of Uno 52 was given a 7/10, and criticized for its "lack of additional modes and gameplay variations"[4] despite the special modes category. Oddly enough, the Nintendo DS version of the game, which only introduces higher quality graphics and music(with some slight changes), slightly more customizability, a better menu layout that makes profiles more intuitive, statistics such as time played, and wireless multiplayer with others nearby who have the game, was given a 4/10 because the UI being "stretched onto two screens" makes it look "tiny and sparse"[5]. It also criticized important aspects that were part of both games, such as poker hands being face up, and how you aren't always supposed to be able to remember to say Uno in time, like in the real game. It also has plenty of incorrect information, like claiming that the Nintendo DS version of Uno 52 scrapped special modes, and that you can't press a button to call Uno anymore. Both reviews say that the lack of betting was a missed opportunity despite the fact that the poker part is meant to center on how you do always have the information of everyone else's poker hands, instead of how you don't in actual poker, so betting on what's certain doesn't make sense.
Glitches[]
- If the first card flipped over to make the discard pile is a wild, the first player will get to pick the color, but afterwards, until you move your selection, the cards will be shaded to show which ones can be played to your poker hand, and not by which ones can be played to the discard pile.
- If there are no cards besides the top one in the discard pile when the draw pile runs out, then the draw pile will just be empty, as there are no cards to move into it. This is intentional, but if this happens, and at the same time you are unable to play any cards(requiring you to draw) then the game will crash. However, if a CPU is unable to play or draw any cards, then it will just do nothing.
- If you draw a card that you are able to play, and choose to keep it, all cards to the right of it in your hand will no longer be darkened, even if they couldn't be played.
- In a custom game set to survival with human players, if a human player gets eliminated, that profiles awards will be transferred to the player clockwise of them(even if it's a CPU). In the start of the first round after the elimination, the awards will appear in the wrong spot, but this is corrected quickly. This will actually remove the awards from that profile, besides the first star, as it is tied to your challenge mode progress. For this reason doing this is not recommended.
Trivia[]
- Although doing so is impossible without cheats, if you somehow managed to make it so that, at the end of a round, all players in a survival game have 0 or negative chips and get eliminated, when you exit the results screen it just won't fade back in from black and just get stuck playing the victory music on loop. (Only tested on the DS emulator DeSmuMe, results may differ on GBA or real hardware)
- When the draw pile runs out of cards and all of the cards not at the top of the discard pile become the new draw pile, the order of the cards doesn't change, so it isn't like the physical motion of flipping the cards over.
- In a local multiplayer game the player who's current turn it is always appears at the bottom of the screen(s), so the only way to see a player who isn't at the bottom win in local multiplayer is to have the last card played be a draw 2, so that it has to go to the next player to make them draw 2 cards.
- When you set the draw 4 bluffing house rule to bluff off, which makes it so that you aren't allowed to play a draw 4 if you could match by color, you also become unable to play a wild skip or wild reverse if you could match by color, despite the two cards having no sort of bluffing mechanics.
- In the Game Boy Advance version of Uno 52, endurance mode was against 2 CPUs, but in Nintendo DS version this was changed to 3. However, the manual continues to say that it is against two CPUs, right next to a screenshot that proves otherwise.
- The moving text at the bottom of the screen is referred to as "ticker text" in the manual.
- The wild symbol card cannot use a joker symbol, despite being able to look like the other Alternate Cards.
- Centered text (such as that seen in the Main menu of the Nintendo DS version) will round leftward if the text has an odd length.
External links[]
References[]
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