Palette – Mixing Colors for Fun and Profit

We all remember playing with paints as kids and learning about colors. Mixing yellow and blue made green! Mixing blue and red made purple! Mixing all the colors together made… brown.

Re-live your childhood painting experience, without the mess, in Palette, a card game by Michael Epstein for 1-4 players to play in about 20 minutes.

How to Play

Shuffle the Hue cards well. Then deal five out in a line, making the palette. That’s it. You’re ready to play!

On each player’s turn, they take exactly two actions. For each action, they can Scrape or Score. So they can Scrape twice, Score twice, or do one of each.

Scrape

To Scrape, choose a Primary color from the palette and add it to your hand, along with all adjacent cards in the same color.

Then refill the palette, shifting all cards away from the deck and then dealing out cards to make a total of five cards out again.

Score

If you have the correct combination of primary colors in your hand, you can choose one or more secondary cards to score.

For each secondary card on the palette, you must discard primary colors from your hand to match: Red and Yellow to score an Orange card, Yellow and Blue to score a Green card, etc. To score a Brown card, discard one of each primary color (Red, Yellow, Blue).

You may score more than one secondary card from the palette, but all the cards you score must be adjacent to each other, and you cannot reuse a primary color.

The more cards you score in one action, the more points they’re worth! Rotate your pile of cards scored in this action, orienting them to show the number of cards taken at the top.

After scoring, you once again need to refill the palette. Shift all the cards away from the deck and deal out into the empty space(s) to make a total of five face-up cards again.

Mud

After refilling, if there are no Primary colors in the palette, the paints are overmixed – “muddied” – and need to be refreshed.

Discard all five cards from the palette, and deal out five new cards.

End Game

A game of Palette ends immediately when the deck is empty and the palette has fewer than five cards.

Players count up their points, using the value at the top edge of each card in their score pile. Whoever has the most points is the best painter!

Variations: Solo Painting, Longer Game, or Simpler Scoring

No one to mix colors with? Palette can also be played solo. Set up as usual and see how many points you can score by the time the deck runs out!

Shuffle the discard pile the first time the deck runs out to play a longer, higher-scoring game. All the players will get more chances to see secondary colors when they have enough primary colors to score them.

And for younger players, ditch the somewhat complex scoring. Instead, each collected set of secondary colors (Orange, Purple, Green) is worth 1 point. In this variation, Brown acts as a wild to stand in for a missing third color to make a set.

Impressions

Palette is not the first game we’ve seen that plays on the ideas of art and color (you may remember our reviews of Color Field, Ink, and Pigment). But it may be the first that specifically wants players to mix colors to make something different. The only other game I can think of with color addition is Ultimatch, and it serves a different purpose there.

The fundamentals of Palette are solid: collect sets of primary colors to build up your flexibility to score secondary colors. You’re incentivized to keep cards for a long time. You’ll press your luck to try to get more secondary colors out on the table, potentially allowing you to score big. But you’ll lose any chance at them if the palette goes to “mud”, so be careful!

We didn’t love the slow start to each game. No one starts with any cards in hand, so the first several turns are all the same. Scrape (pick up) a primary color, refill the Palette, and Scrape again.

Once players had a few cards, decisions started to get more interesting, but were still often constrained by the luck of the draw. For example, if you have not seen any Blue cards, you’re limited to either picking up more primary colors, or scoring Orange.

Artful?

Palette‘s cards have realistic-looking paint blobs, which were fun. But I really wish the secondary color cards had shown the mixing of colors required, with streaks or smears of primary colors around the paint blob somewhere.

On the whole, I was looking for a little more from Palette. I liked novelty of color addition as a mechanic and the ways you collect sets to later collect other sets. But there’s just not enough here to give it staying power for us.

But Palette is an inexpensive game with real art concepts and could make a novel gift for an art lover. If you’d like to Gogh for it, get Palette direct from Copper Frog Games or ask for it at your local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Palette from Copper Frog Games for this review.