The card game Uno has had a bit of a revival recently thanks to Xbox Live, and you can play it on your Next Gen phone thanks to Mau Mau. It's exactly the same game, but with a different name.

Next Gen Hors D'oeuvre 5: Mau Mau

What is it?

Basically, it's Uno. Mau Mau is actually a fairly old card game, pre-dating Uno itself. The aim is to get rid of all your cards before anyone else, by matching one of their cards with the colour or number of the card currently on the top of the pile. There are various special cards which can be used to make others take extra cards, miss a turn, change the current colour or reverse the direction of play.

To avoid copyright problems Mau Mau uses a normal deck of cards instead of the familiar Uno pack, but the developers have added four different colours to represent the four different suits, so in effect it's still pretty much the same deck as Uno.

Why should I get it?

Mau Mau is easy to get into, very addictive, and implemented with a simple but attractive graphic interface. The attention to detail is nice, with the players showing different expressions depending on their hand, and surreal background animations such as a dangling spider and cuckoo clock.

It's a shame they haven't used the full QVGA screen of modern phones, but if you can live with that there's a gem of a card game here.

It's a budget title, $4.99 / €4.99 / £3.49.

You can read All About Symbian's review of Mau Mau here.

Getting hold of Mau Mau

Mau Mau can be purchased from the link below, and you can also download a free demo if you want to try it out first:

Get Mau Mau here!

To install Mau Mau, buy and download the Mau Mau SIS file from the link above, then connect your phone to your computer by USB cable or Bluetooth and use the Nokia PC Suite's application installer program. If you don't have Nokia PC Suite installed on your PC, it's a really good idea to get it, as it lets you do lots of cool stuff with your phone. You can download the latest version from the Nokia PC Suite page.