Objective of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Twinkling Lights Game
The objective of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Twinkling Lights Game is to create patterns in the Christmas lights that match your pattern cards.
Setup for National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Twinkling Lights Game
- Randomize the Light tiles and place them face down in a stack where all of the players can reach them.
- Reveal two Light tiles and place them face-up next to one another in the middle of the table.
- Shuffle the red and green Pattern cards separately. Deal two red and one green card to each player. Players can look at their own cards, but should keep them secret from the other players.
- Return the remaining Pattern cards to the box.
- The youngest player starts the game.
Playing National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Twinkling Lights Game
Starting with the first player and moving clockwise throughout the game, each player will take their turn. A player’s turn consists of two actions.
- Draw a Tile and Place It
- Score Pattern Cards
Drawing A Tile and Placing It
You will begin each of your turns by drawing one of the Light tiles. You will look at the tile that you drew and decide where you would like to place it.
Normally you will play your Light tile next to one of the tiles already played to the table. You can play a tile anywhere as long as it touches another tile either vertically or horizontally. You may not play a tile if it only touches another tile diagonally.
There are a couple special Light tiles though that can be played a little differently.
+ Tiles
+ tiles can be played like any other Light tile. They also have a special ability that allows you to play them on top of any tile already played to the table.
Broken Wire Tiles
Broken Wire tiles are played like any other Light tile (excluding + tiles). You can play it horizontally or vertically next to any other tile.
The one catch with a Broken Wire tile is that you don’t have to play it yourself. If you want to play the tile you can. Otherwise you can decide to pass it to one of the other players. The only restriction is that you can’t pass the Broken Wire tile to a player that already has one in front of them. If all of the other players already have a Broken Wire tile in front of them, you must play the tile.
The player that you pass the Broken Wire tile to has to play it on their next turn instead of drawing their own tile.
When you pass the Broken Wire tile to another player, you will draw a new tile to play yourself.
Scoring Pattern Cards
After you play a tile to the table, you will look at the Pattern cards in your hand. You are looking at the patterns on the top of the cards to see if you can find a matching pattern on the tiles played to the table.
If you have a card in your hand whose light combination exactly matches a combination of lights on the tiles in the middle of the table, you can score the card. The lights have to be in the exact same order as pictured on the card, and they need to be on the same light strand. You will place the Pattern card face up in front of you. If you have multiple cards that you can score on your turn, you can turn them all over on the same turn.
You can score a Pattern card with the tile you just placed, or you can use tiles previously played to the table. You cannot score a Pattern card until you have played your Light tile though.
Winning National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Twinkling Lights Game
The game will end when one of the players have scored all three of their Pattern cards (all of them are face up on the table). The player that completes all of their Pattern cards first, wins the game.
If all of the Light tiles have been played and no one has completed all three of their Pattern cards, the game goes to the tiebreaker. The player that scored/turned over the most Pattern cards wins the game. If there is still a tie and only one of the tied players completed their Pattern card with four lights, that player wins the game. Should the tie still not be broken, the tied players will share the victory.
Year: 2020 | Publisher: Funko Games | Designer: Funko Games | Artist: NA
Genres: Family, Pattern Recognition, Tile Placement
Ages: 8+ | Number of Players: 2-4 | Length of Game: 20 minutes
Difficulty: Light | Strategy: Light-Moderate | Luck: Moderate
Components: 35 Light tiles, 14 Pattern cards, instructions
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