Pickup Basketball Review

Pickup Basketball is a nice little deck builder game of 3 on 3 basketball. Each player starts out with a hand of 3 rookies and 2 veterans. On their turn, they can play 3 of the players from their hands to the court or trade them to add new players from the trade block to their bench (discard pile). They can then take one of the players on the court and attempt to score. Every single player has shot locations that they guarantee a basket with. When shooting, roll the dice and if they land on the shot location they score as many points as their offensive skill allows. If there is a player across from them, then they subtract the defensive skill from the total for the points. The better the players, the higher the skills and abilities they have. This cycle repeats until someone hits 40 points and is then declared the winner.

The Good: This game does not reinvent the wheel but what it does, it does really well. The turns moved really quickly and it was nice to actually see most of the deck after our first game. You rarely get that in a deck builder. The developers also really factored in representation. You can tell that this was a labor of love.

The Okay: For a basketball themed game, it felt a little odd that you could score 9 points in one shot. I would have liked to see it maybe score to 21 and retool the way that scoring works for 2-3 points per shot. This is not a major problem, though. It's just thematically a bit odd.

The Not So Good: Maybe I was playing it wrong, but it felt like if you were the second player you had an opportunity to have a lot of open shots that could score you a ton of points if you had lucky rolls. Having your player go to the bench after a miss just allowed my opponent to shoot freely. I saw this in another review but it was worth noting here as well; once you have a decent lineup, the trade block almost becomes unnecessary.

Overall: 6/10 lucky dice rolls

Pickup Basketball was a really solid filler game. I would play this with the right person any time. It scored what it scored because of this mostly. You need to have the right opponent. If sports aren't your thing then maybe stay away but if you are a basketball fan and looking for a 2 player game Pickup Basketball should definitely be at the top of your list.