I've played a couple times; great game. Definitely something I want to play more. I worry about how to avoid excessive meta gaming when playing a lot with the same group. If you know too much about when people give what clues and such, you could give more info than the game intends you to give.
The point of the game is to give more info than the game intends you to give.
But where does it become "cheating"? You could come up with all sorts of meta-rules with your own group about what certain things mean; that's clearly outside what the rules intended to allow you to say. I dunno, something like "every time I tell you that you have exactly 1 yellow; you should play that yellow. But every time I tell you that you have exactly 1 red; you should play that red."
You need meta-rules to win the game. It's literally not possible to get 25 points if you have to receive 2 clues about every card, and it would be a super boring game as well. Unspoken meta-rules such as "when there's a red 1 on the board and I tell you that you have exactly one 2, it's a red 2" exist even in your first game — this meta-rule could be simplified to "assume that your teammates aren't idiots", and as your team becomes more experienced, you can transfer more information with each clue you give and sometimes discarding or playing certain cards too. And it will be super fun, and beating the game will still be a challenge, but not impossible. Meta-rules like "every time I tell you that you have exactly 1 yellow; you should play that yellow" will just hurt you, because if you receive a clue about a single yellow in your hand, in most situations you'll conclude that the only reason why you would receive that clue is that you should play the card, and then there are some situations where you might want to conclude that you received the clue because it's the only remaining yellow 4 in the game so you aren't allowed to discard it.
In a way, you could say that the point of the game is to find the meta-rules that make you win games — such as "discard your oldest cards first", "if you received a clue about multiple cards and one of them had been in your hand for centuries and you just drew the other, play the one that you just drew", etc. In other words, these are just plain good plays, and your team will win games when everyone can assume that everyone in the team plays well.
And then if it's clear that I *am* following that general rule, and then suddenly I discard a newer card, it says that I actually do have some information about it and I need to communicate that to the other players.
That's pretty cool, we've been using that to communicate "I'm doing something stupid intentionally, and there's a reason why I'm doing something stupid intentionally just to do something stupid intentionally so don't make the play you would otherwise make in this situation".
