Base price: $12.
2 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 2 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Championland: Volleyball was provided by Button Shy.

Sometimes I write this part first, sometimes I write it last. This one’s a “last”, this time around, but that does happen. I’m always a bit pepped to write up a Button Shy game, mostly because while they adhere to the same basic concepts (18 cards, quick to play, generally), they bring in such a wide variety of designers that you’re always getting something interesting or novel when you try them out. I think that’s a lot of fun and I’m always excited to support the publisher. So let’s see how this one plays!

In Championland: Volleyball, you’ve got a simple goal. You want to win at volleyball. That’s kind of the whole thing, really. You just … you really like volleyball. Everyone in town does. It’s very easy to field a team and everyone takes volleyball the appropriate level of seriously. I assume that’s how Haikyu works, but I haven’t seen it. I just have some friends that are very excited about it for reasons that are outside of the scope of this review. But I digress. Get your team together and bump, set, or spike as you prefer to win the big game! Can you successfully win three sets?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

Very little! Give each player a set of nine cards in one color. Have them shuffle them, making a randomized hand of nine cards. You’re good to start!

Gameplay

This one’s pretty straightforward! Your goal is to either control two zones or put your opponent in a position where they can’t play. First player to win three sets wins!

To start, you can play a card to any of three zones, with one restriction: you can only play the leftmost or rightmost card in your hand. Once a card is in a zone, you can only play a card that’s one more or one less than the current top card in that zone. If you have more cards in a zone than your opponent, you control that zone. If you ever start your turn in control of two zones, you win the set! If your opponent ever can’t play to a zone, you win the set! Set the last card that you played aside and start a new round!

There are special cards (1 / 5 / 9) that can force your opponent to play to a zone of your choice, block them from playing in a zone, or force them to play to the same zone as the 9 (respectively).

Again, first player to win three sets wins!

Player Count Differences

None! This is a two-player game.

Strategy

• Be careful when you play your 1 / 5 / 9. It’s not too difficult for one of those to be the card that wins you the set, but if you play one and you win, you lose that card. Then you won’t have it for the rest of the game, which might be kind of a bummer.
• There’s a lot of ways you can get trapped. If your opponent forces you into a spot with their special cards or if you play your runs wrong, you might have a zone that you just can’t play to again. That’s obviously bad, but the special cards is worse; you can pretty much automatically lose the set if the wrong one gets played against you.
• Watch out for obvious loss states. Don’t, for instance, play a 4 to one zone, a 3 to another, and a 5 to the third zone. You can still play, but you obviously have restricted your options a pretty good amount, which isn’t good. This is further compounded if you have removed cards from play by winning other sets.
• You lose a card each time you win! Try not to lose the wrong cards. You really don’t want to lose special cards if you can avoid it. That said, they’re sometimes the only way to win a set. Just try not to lose cards such that you strand one card with nothing above or below it.
• There’s possibly a strategy around trying to get your opponent to lose “good” cards. You do have to lose a set or two for this to work, but if you do, you might be able to rally back and win three sets in a row? I can’t recommend it but it’s possible.
• Playing the 1 is a strong move, especially if you know which cards your opponent is likely to still have. You can figure out where to force them to play so that they’ll lose the round, especially if you’re keeping track of what cards they had to already set aside.
• You can really trip players up if you play your 5 at the right time. You can just clean block them from playing to this zone! That’s pretty good. That said, it’s easier said than done, as with all things.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• I like the art style a lot! It’s got kind of an old-timey sports poster vibe to it that really resonates with me. It almost makes me want to try a sport? It’s not going to work, but volleyball is fun.
• I also really like that the game is played mostly the same way (the Championland Games), but the strategies and style are very different. It makes the core game system easy enough to pick up (you just shuffle your hand and can only play from the right or left sides).
• Having to keep your hand in order makes the game tough but fun. It’s a great way to force players to play their cards in a certain way while still giving them some choices. Plus, it forces you to be strategic about the cards that you’re going to play and how. The additional challenge of needing to make runs of cards makes the whole thing nice and complicated.
• Very portable, which is always nice. Again, the classic Button Shy advantage works to its favor, here. You can keep the entire series in your back pocket if you feel like it.

Mehs

• Shuffling nine cards well isn’t particularly easy. It’s a small number of cards! It gets even smaller as you win sets! You can just kind of end up doing that overhand shuffle that nobody likes. I guess it gets the job done though.

Cons

• You can just have a bad hand. Thankfully, you’re playing best of three sets, so it’s not a huge deal if you lose one. Plus, your opponent loses a card, so it might not be a bad idea to lose one if it knocks out one of their better cards.

Overall: 7.5 / 10

Overall, I like Championland: Volleyball! It’s definitely a game that surprised me when I first picked it up just because, I mean, I basically had no idea what to think of it? I had some context because I had actually played Championland: Track & Field first, but I knew the games were going to be different (and I’ll have a review up of that one in a couple weeks). I think that I knew the core gameplay loop was going to be fun just because I like other games where you can’t organize your hand and you have to play in order. That usually activates some strategic part of my brain that’s interested and interesting, so the game usually ends up being pretty neat as well. I wasn’t disappointed, for certain. I do kind of want to make a Championland Olympics since they seem to already have three sports, but I wonder what else is coming down the pipeline for this series, if anything. I had only just heard about it at ShyCon, I think. Of the sports, I’m likely most interested in volleyball conceptually, but I do appreciate that this game does one key thing that I like, which is that it actually matters that you play multiple sets. Some games just have you play multiple sets so that they can pad the game’s length, which I get, but this forces the winner to lose their most recently played card, so the strategy starts to change and can potentially put them at a disadvantage. It’s neat! Short, fun, and interesting: all good words to describe Championland: Volleyball, and if you’re a fan of any of those things or you just like volleyball, I’d recommend checking the game out!

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