Trying to kill some time while in a rented house in 1979, I remember my mother teaching me the Uno card game in Seekonk, Massachusetts. The game was quite simple and quite addictive. Of course, I hadn’t really thought about Uno again until the week of E3.

You see while everyone at GameShark was gearing up for the big show, I was left home trying to watch grainy video of all the big shows. Then while looking around Xbox Live Marketplace, I saw a new game was added to the mix under “Camera Games.” (I was thinking, hmm, I don’t have a camera, but let’s see anyway)…

The game was Uno..I immediately downloaded the demo and was so enthralled that I didn’t hesitate to purchase the full version. After all 400 points doesn’t buy much these days given rising gas prices and all, but it does buy Uno!

Uno is just like I remember – four players each receive seven cards and the goal is to get rid of those seven cards. There’s a center pile and each turn you can dispose of one card by matching the color of the card or the number of the card in the center of the pile. For example if there’s a yellow 7, you can put down any yellow card, or a 7 of any color, or a wild card. In addition, each color has some “Draw Two” cards (which the next player has to draw two more cards and lose a turn), a “skip” card (next player just loses turn), a “reverse” card (play reverses to the player who just played a card before you), the aforementioned wild card (you pick the color for the next player), and a Wild Draw Four card (you choose a color and the next player draws four cards). With a wild draw four card, the player who’s stuck drawing the four cards can ‘challenge’ you. If say, the center pile is green, and you have a card that’s green, but you play a wild draw four when you could have played a green card, you’ll have to draw six cards. If you don’t have a card that’s green and a player challenges you, he’ll have to draw six. (Note: use challenges wisely).

Anyway, when you get down to one card in your hand, you have to call “Uno” by hitting the X button. If you don’t call Uno and someone challenges you, you have to draw an additional two cards. If no one challenges your non-call of Uno, you get away with it. The player who is out of cards ‘wins’ and collects points from all the other players. The number of points is the face value of their cards, with wild/reverse and draw twos counting as more points. The first person to 250 points wins.

Now that we have the rules out of the way, let’s get to the gameplay. Graphics are pretty, but nothing to write home about – although it is a card game, so what are you going to do? Each player has an icon and while offline, you get names such as “Green Player”, online you’ll see their GamerTag and their Gamer picture. This is where you’d see their Xbox Live Camera if it were available as well.

When it’s your turn to play a card, you’re given a suggested card already so it makes it pretty simple to play. You can choose a different card than what’s suggested of course.

You can set your own custom game if you like where you can turn challenges off or different variations of games. You can also download different sets of cards. At press time, the only set available was the 35th anniversary set, which added a new wrinkle. If you played the 35th anniversary card you’d see a fanfare of confetti and the next player would have to play either a 3 or a 5 or draw a card. The other catch is that if you’re left holding a 35th anniversary card, it would give the other player 75 points!

I have to say I really enjoy the laid back audio in this game. You can use custom music, but the audio in this game seems English Beat-esque. The music is very enjoyable – kind of soothing in the way of Katamari Damacy.

Online play is definitely where this game shines, it’s a laugh riot with four players. When someone drops, the game continues with a pinch-computer player, which is nice. Offline play isn’t bad, but nothing can compare to playing with 4 friends online.