Thirty One Review

Thrity One is a card drawing game that takes some of the rules of Blackjack and makes them its own. As you can probably guess, the player’s goal is to use their cards to total up a score of thirty one, or close enough to it. You’ll play against two AI opponents in a series of matches in hopes of earning the most coins by winning hands.

Players are given three cards initially to play with. From here, you’ll have to decide to either take the card on the table or flip the mystery card to replace one of your lower cards. In order to get the highest score possible, you’ll need to match a single suit for all three cards. If players are confident that their hand is the highest, they can end their card swapping by tapping on the knock icon on the bottom of the screen.

The game’s visual presentation is very basic, displaying the cards themselves on a table. There is no game sound at all but players are free to use their iPod during gameplay to break the silence. The game features one main mode but allows players to access online leaderboards via OpenFeint.

Thirty One is a moderate adaptation of Blackjack but some of its rules make the game difficult to enjoy. In order to have any chance of winning, you need to collect three cards of the same suit and quite often before this happens, the AI players will have knocked on their hand, giving you one card swap till the end of the game. There is some potential here but ultimately, card game fans might want to stick with what they know.