100% Orange Juice – postmortem

Wow, that actually lasted longer than I thought it would!

One of the elements of this game that I didn’t mention last time (because I forgot about it) is the deck-building aspect. At the beginning of every game, you choose 10 cards that go into a communal deck. When you draw a card, you may or may not get one of the ones you put in. The game suggests choosing a card that helps you more than it helps other players, but there weren’t any obvious synergies, and in any case it all gets drowned out by the chaos of the dice-rolling mechanics.

So it’s basically as much of a random-fest as I remembered. This time, I got all the way to the last scenario in the opening single-player campaign before realizing that the only way I was going to beat it was by playing it over and over again until I got lucky. Yeah, no thanks.

Out of curiosity, I went to go check the Steam page for this game, and to my shock, the reviews are mostly positive! They generally praised the aesthetics (which is fair – the game is pretty cute, honestly) and also the pointless randomness(???). To paraphrase Daria Morgendorffer, 100% Orange Juice is bad. Don’t people know the difference between good and bad? Seriously, if all you want is randomness with cool visuals, go stare at a lava lamp.

In the intro, I compared this game to Mario Party, but the game it really reminds me of is Killer Bunnies, which I hate for the same reasons. Mario Party requires a decent amount of skill and strategy (even if chance plays too great a role in the proceedings), whereas 100% Orange Juice and Killer Bunnies both have no skill and only enough strategy to get your feet wet. I guess there’s some interest to be had in setting things up and seeing what happens, but that’s not enough to engage me when I could have a monkey make decisions for me and get similar results.

Recommended if you’re the sort of person who enjoys both parts of drag bingo. If you like games of pure chance, you might find that the pretty lights on display are enough to satisfy you. Otherwise, I’d give this one a miss.