Earthly elements have long played a role in card games, whether we’re talking Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon.  But while water, fire, air and rock types in those titles tend to represent symbolic groupings, there aren’t too many games out there that simply address the blunt force of these elements.  In the simplest way possible, Eleminis has stepped up to fill this void.

Eleminis plays like a marriage of Rock Paper Scissors and Uno.  The game features five miniature elements – Fire, Water, Air, Rock, and Plant – and a player must have one of each in front of them to win.  To do this, players will take turns drawing cards and placing them in one of their five open card slots.  Since this can lead to having more than one element in play at the same time, you’ll need to place new elements on top of old by employing a Rock Paper Scissors style mechanic.  Fire, for example, can burn Plants and Air – so you can place it on top of either of those cards.  Plants swallow Air and Water, Rocks can crush Fire and Plants and so on…

If this were all that Eleminis had to offer, it wouldn’t be more than a completely random race to getting 5 elements first.  Luckily, there’s a real “take that!” element to the game.  In addition to playing cards in your row of five, you can play a card you draw in any row of five.  Is your opponent one card away from winning?  Use a Fire to burn their Plant to the ground, thereby putting two Fire cards in their row instead of one, and leaving them scrambling to somehow ditch the Fire and find a new plant.

In addition to the element cards, there are three other types of cards mixed into the deck that really up the antagonism factor.  Action cards will trigger single turn events like skipping your turn, discarding a set number of cards on the table, and even swapping cards with other players.  Star cards will act as wilds, replacing any element you may be missing.  Trash cards, which you’ll want to play in your opponent’s row, sit there like a lump and can only be removed by using a star or a relevant action card.  All in all, there’s enough variety here to keep the game feeling fresh and fun with each new round.

But while the game is fun, it’s also alarmingly simple.  The comparison to Uno is fairly apt, as the two games share a similar audience.  This is a game that’s meant for very light party time fun – the sort of thing you might break out to kill 5 or 10 minutes between rounds of something juicier.  There are enough cards in the deck to support 8 players, though it can also be enjoyed by as few as 2.  And while the box suggests an age of 7+, kids as little as 5 or 6 will have no problem grasping the mechanics here – Eleminis is really, really easy.

In terms of production quality, the cards have a strong, solid feel to them – not unlike a standard deck of Bicycle playing cards.  The art is fairly basic and somewhat uninspired, but it gets the point across.  The one thing we were a little puzzled by, however, was the inclusion of two blank cards in the deck.  These cards still had the Eleminis backing, but their fronts were blank.  Were these misprints, or DIY cards?  I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but if these were misprints, don’t be surprised is a few of your cards end up blank too.

Eleminis is good kid-friendly fun, but there’s not much here that’s really going to hold the interest of a more serious gamer for long.  If you’re looking for an easy-to-teach 10 minute card game to add to the collection for when non-gamers and nieces and nephews come to visit, Eleminis would be a good choice.  If you’re looking for something with a little more substance though, this probably isn’t the card game you’re looking for.