So this month we’re going to do something that might be considered a little boring… We hope you agree that it’s not, but this month is Classic Games Month! Obviously we’ll try to put give fun and interesting take on them and it should be good as we have just ordered a video camera… So (hopefully) our first fun video will go up this month, depending on time. We tried to think of the most monolithic and iconic games we could think of. Here’s what we came up with:
As you may have noticed the site structure has change just a little, with the Games We Have and Games We Want pages now being subcategories of the Games We… page. On top of that there’s the new Games We’ve Made page, which is very small at the moment but will get bigger soon.
This is because we’ve published the rules to a card game we’ve invented called Crush the Crown! Check it out and let us know what you think.
Also we FINALLY have a video camera (it arrived today, so I’m super excited) so expect cool videos soon.
Lastly we’re going to the UK Board Games Expo at the end of this month so expect some awesome posts about that.
We would like your feedback, play the game and tell us what’s good about it (or bad about it, as the case may be). Either comment on the page or on this post OR email us at tametheboardgame@hotmail.co.uk if you want to give us a large exposition of everything that’s wrong with it.
Number of Players: 2 – as many drunk people you can fit round a deck of cards (wouldn’t recommend with less than 3 people)
Year of Publication: Who knows?
Creator: The Irish
I Guarantee You Will Laugh More Than Any Other Game:
So this has to go down as one of my favourite card games of all time. It’s very simple, huge amounts of fun and anyone can play it (they might just be bad at it, which will make it funnier).
Appreciate our custom cards!
What’s In The Box:
Unlike most of the games we review this game only needs one thing:
1 x Standard 52 deck of cards
Playing The Game:
Objective: Don’t be the person holding all the cards at the end of the game!
Now there are quite a few variations of this game what with it being quite ambiguous and not actually having an official publication or official set of rules, so it’s up to the people playing it to decide what to play by. But here’s how we play it:
The basic principle is the same as Snap (I hope you are all familiar with the concept of Snap – although its real name is Slapjack). The difference between it and snap is that it’s the card that matches what the person is saying rather than the card under it. So the cards are split, face down, equally between players. The first player puts a card in the centre and says Ace, now if the card is an Ace hands go in, the last hand in is the loser and picks up the cards. If its not an Ace the next person puts a card down face up and says Two, if it’s a two hands go in, if not play continues to Three, Four etc. all the way to King and then back to Ace. The picture below should demonstrate what I mean:
You only snap when the card played is the same as what was said
Now in addition to this you can also choose to snap on actual snap cards, say someone puts a ten down and the next card is also a ten. The game gets interesting when people start to lose all the cards. The person who loses all their cards is NOT the winner, in fact they’re not even out of the game, they still have to say the right card when it comes round to them and their hand still has to go in when snap happens. This way a player can go through phases of having and not having cards multiple times in a game. The game is only over when only one person is left with all the cards in their hand. So even when there’s only one person, or even in a rare case where no one is playing any cards the game is not over until the final snap and one person is left with the whole deck.
For a more concise and directly playable version of the rules see here.
Additional Rules:
These rules you may only want to introduce after playing it a few times:
Flinching – if a person flinches they have to pick up all the cards.
Pace – You have to keep a steady fast rhythm to the game and if you break it by forgetting what you’re supposed to be saying or by not noticing it’s your turn you have to pick up.
Queens – Some rules state that you snap on a Queen too, but this is really up to you.
Change of direction – When Jacks are played (or a card of the players choosing) the direction of play changes.
Word confusion – Changing the word for some of the cards to something obscure and if a player forgets this when saying it they have to pick up.
DRINKING! – This is the most obvious additional rule (it being called Irish Snap and all) but the player who picks up has to drink.
Variations:
Winning – The first and most major variant is that players to lose all their cards are actually out of the game and win… I personally believe this version is for losers with no real commitment.
No speaking – Numbers are counted in your head and you snap in the same way you would if they were said. Makes it much harder as you have to pay even more attention. I tried an interesting variation of this rule (sort of) where half the people playing were Polish and they said the cards in Polish and the English people said them in English… It got very interesting.
Strategy:
HAVE QUICK HANDS! – There is very little strategy that can actually be applied to this game except having quick hands and not getting distracted!
DRUG THE OTHER PLAYERS! – We don’t actually suggest this… But it would help. Also keep in mind you just want to make them a bit slow, not knock them out.
To Conclude:
Ok, the loss of life may be a bit extreme.
First of all take heed of the picture above, this is why the drinking version is good… After a while you start to not feel the pain – but this also how hands are lost.
Note I have not put a “History and Interesting Things” section in this post; that’s because this game doesn’t seem to have a history. Well it probably does, but not a documented one, so if anyone knows anything interesting about it or finds anything beyond my lazy research capacity then please let me know in the comments. I would strongly advise playing this game, it’s only a 2 or 3 out of 5 on a purely objective level but is also a 5 out of 5 because of the huge amount of fun and endless hours of entertainment it has given me.
Pitis an interesting trading game. It’s got very few rules and can be played in any amount of time as the winner is the first person to reach a pre-determined amount of points. So games can be very very quick. Although the game is 3-8 players you should definitely opt for 8 if you can get the people, the more people, the better with this game.
What’s In The Box:
The stuff!
One Pit “Corner” card
One 72 card deck (8 suits of 9 cards)
One “Bull” card and one “Bear” card
Playing The Game:
Objective: To be the first player to score 500 points by cornering the market on a specific commodity.
There are two ways of playing this game, basic, and slightly less basic. The only difference between them being that in the basic version the Bull and Bear cards are removed from the deck before play starts.
Setting Up:
Place the Pit Corner board in the middle of the table.
Prepare a score sheet.
Select a dealer and prepare the deck. The dealer takes one complete suit for every person playing (it’s not in the rules to do this, but we usually play with the highest-scoring suits) and shuffles them, together with the Bear and the Bull if they’re in play.
Deal 9 cards, face-down, to each player.
Once all this is done players can then look at their cards and choose which commodity they’re going to collect. It’s best to go for whatever you currently have most of in your hand. Once everyone’s had a chance to look at their cards the dealer announces “The Exchange is open!” It’s not compulsory, but you can do this with as much bravado as you like, just for fun.
Now the Pit is open players can trade cards. You can choose any number of cards from your hand and hold them face down in the centre of the table, you then announce the number of cards you want to exchange this is generally very noisy. You can then trade with any other player offering the same number of cards. If no one’s offering the same number you may want to higher or lower the number of cards you’re exchanging.
This continues until one player has all nine of one commodity in their hand. They then hit the Pit board in the center and announce “Corner on (insert commodity here)!” When playing without the Bear and Bull, the only player who scores is the one to hit the board. They score the amount of points shown on the cards of the commodity they collected, for instance, a corner on Corn would give that player 75 points. The winner of the hand then reshuffles the deck and deals the next hand.
Playing with the Bull and Bear:
When you add these cards in two players will receive 10 cards instead of 9 in the initial dealing. They can then call corner if they have all nine of one commodity and one of another, simply discarding the extra card when they lay down their hand to show the corner. The game is played as normal, but with these two difference:
The Bear is always a bad card, and you should try and get rid of it as soon as possible if you’re dealt it or traded it. If you hold the Bear, but have all nine of one commodity in your hand, you cannot lay it down whilst you hold the Bear, and if another player goes out whilst you have it you receive a penalty of -20 points, even if your current score is 0.
Our score sheet halfway through the game. I was spectacularly losing.
The Bull is a wild card and can be good or bad. If you’re holding the Bull and you call corner, your score is then doubled. However, if you’re holding the Bull and someone else calls corner, you minus 20 points, as if you were holding the Bear. With the Bull you can go out if you only have eight of the commodities you were collecting and the Bull, as only two players would be able to collect the full nine.
A winning corner on Wheat, with the Bull. Whoever laid this down scored 200 points.
If someone calls corner and you’re holding the Bull and the Bear, your penalty is -40 points. If you’re unlucky, you can end up getting to fairly high minus numbers when playing with the Bear and Bull. You can trade the Bull and the Bear individually, or in combination. But you can never trade more than four cards at a time.
Strategy:
There’s no strategy to this game. Get rid of the Bear fast, and try and trade the Bull if you suspect the round might be about to end by someone else calling the corner. Other than that, try and trade as fast as possible and hope no one else is trying to collect the commodity you want!
History and Interesting Things:
It was first sold in 1904.
The inspiration was the Chicago Board of Trade.
The game has been marketed under all of the following names: Billionaire, Business, Cambio, Dulux pit, Quick 7 and Zaster.
Versions of the game published, starting in 1970, included a bell to start trading.
To Conclude:
This game’s fun, quick and easy, and you can teach it to anyone! It’s a fantastic family game, or just a quick one for playing with a bunch of friends.
So the time has come to review the almighty Poker. Now I must admit to not actually being able to play poker before learning it to write this review. This is not to say I hadn’t played it before, I had a couple of times, but always while being guided like a baby by people who were already in the know. I find this is a bad way to learn games because as well as learning the rules you tend to learn things that aren’t the rules and are just made up by these people, but they’ve convinced themselves they are the rules, and also things that are part of the rules get forgotten. As I’m sure some of you are aware there are like a million different versions of poker, but this is a review specifically of the five card draw version. We will endeavour to play and review all versions of poker in the future (over the next 20 – 60 years) but we thought this was a good starting point.
What’s In The Box:
Cards from our Jack Daniel’s poker set.
To play poker all you really need is a standard 52 card deck. However, we used our Jack Daniels Poker Set which contained:
1 52 deck of Jack Daniels Cards.
10 x Black Chips.
10 x White Chips.
1 x Small Bottle of Jack Daniels Old No.7.
Playing The Game:
Objective: To have the highest ranking hand after two rounds of betting. Also to take all the other peoples money, until everyone else goes bust.
Now for a good and clear set of exact rules to this game see here (these are the rules we learnt from).
To start choose to play the game either with or without betting. It’s far more fun with betting:
The starting set up.
With betting you set a starting bet, which is the bet everyone has to put down just to be dealt cards. We set it as one white chip and we decided black chips where worth two white chips. Once the starting bet is placed by everyone five cards are dealt to each player by the dealer. The players then look at those cards and, from the left of the dealer, choose to either:
CALL – The player decides to match whatever’s already in the pot. If no one has put anything extra in the pot this means they put nothing in.
RAISE – The player decides to raise the pot (normally you set a maximum raise, we set it as one black chip). They do this by adding more money to it. Any player who then wants to stay in the round has to match the amount they’ve added.
FOLD – The player decides there’s no point continuing with the round and folds by not matching the raise in the pot and puts their cards face down on the table, taking care not to show any of the other players their cards.
After that round of betting anyone who owes the pot anything (because it was raised after their turn to bet) decides whether to call it or to fold. Then each player, from the left of the dealer, then has the chance to switch up to three cards in their hand. Once each player has done this another round of betting is done, exactly like the first, and then cards are revealed.
The Reveal.
The person with the highest hand wins the round and claims the pot. The hands are (listed from highest to lowest):
Five of a Kind – A five of a kind (which is only possible when using wild cards) is the highest possible hand. If more than one hand has five of a kind, the higher card wins (Five Aces beats five kings, which beat five queens, and so on).
Straight Flush – A straight flush is the best natural hand. A straight flush is a straight (5 cards in order, such as 5-6-7-8-9) that are all of the same suit. As in a regular straight, you can have an ace either high (A-K-Q-J-T) or low (5-4-3-2-1). However, a straight may not ‘wraparound’. (Such as K-A-2-3-4, which is not a straight). An Ace high straight-flush is called a Royal Flush and is the highest natural hand.
Four of a Kind – Four of a kind is simply four cards of the same rank. If there are two or more hands that qualify, the hand with the higher-rank four of a kind wins. If, in some bizarre game with many wild cards, there are two four of a kinds with the same rank, then the one with the higher card outside the four wins. General Rule: When hands tie on the rank of a pair, three of a kind, etc, the cards outside break ties following the High Card rules.
Full House – A full house is a three of a kind and a pair, such as K-K-K-5-5. Ties are broken first by the three of a kind, then the pair. So K-K-K-2-2 beats Q-Q-Q-A-A, which beats Q-Q-Q-J-J. (Obviously, the three of a kind can only be similar if wild cards are used.)
Flush – A flush is a hand where all of the cards are the same suit, such as J-8-5-3-2, all of spades. When flushes tie, follow the rules for High Card.
Straight – A straight is 5 cards in order, such as 4-5-6-7-8. An ace may either be high (A-K-Q-J-T) or low (5-4-3-2-1). However, a straight may not ‘wraparound’. (Such as Q-K-A-2-3, which is not a straight). When straights tie, the highest straight wins. (A-K-Q-J-T beats K-Q-J-T-9 down to 5-4-3-2-A). If two straights have the same value (A-K-Q-J-T vs A-K-Q-J-T) they split the pot.
Three of a Kind – Three cards of any rank, matched with two cards that are not a pair (otherwise it would be a Full House). Again, highest three of a kind wins. If both are the same rank, then compare High Cards.
Two Pair – This is two distinct pairs of cards, and a 5th card. The highest pair wins ties. If both hands have the same high pair, the second pair wins. If both hands have the same pairs, the high card wins.
Pair – One pair with three distinct cards. High card breaks ties.
High Card – This is any hand which doesn’t qualify as any one of the above hands. If nobody has a pair or better, then the highest card wins. If multiple people tie for the highest card, they look at the second highest, then the third highest etc. High card is also used to break ties when the high hands both have the same type of hand (pair, flush, straight, etc).
As you may have gathered from those descriptions you can play with the jacks as well, these are wild cards and allow the Five of a Kind had to be played. Also you can play Aces high or low depending on how you’re feeling.
Strategy:
Now there are whole books on poker strategy and the art of reading a persons tell, etc. But I’m not even going to pretend to know even 0.001% of that information. HOWEVER, this is a list of things you should keep in mind when playing with very low level amateurs:
THEY’RE PROBABLY BLUFFING – The other player is probably bluffing because it’s far more fun than not bluffing, especially if you’re not betting anything of real worth. They’re almost definitely going to bluff rather than go out.
KNOW WHICH HANDS ARE WORTH WHAT – This is hardly a strategy comment more a comment of common sense, but having just learnt the game I made quite a few mistakes by not knowing what was worth more that what.
DON’T BET ANYTHING OF WORTH – If you’re learning the game don’t go straight into high stakes betting, it’ll just make you hate each other and give the person who wins false confidence is their poker skills.
History and Interesting Things:
Again there’s whole books full of history and interesting things on poker so I’ll just cover a few:
One of the earliest recorded uses of the game is by Joseph Cowell who wrote that it was played in New Orleans in 1829 with a 20 deck of cards.
The exact origins of the game are uncertain.
While there are a LOT of different versions of poker there are only four main categories of poker and these are; Straight poker, Draw poker (what this is, as the name might tell you), Stud poker and Community Card poker.
It is possible the most popular card game of all time.
It is probably the most popular gambling game of all time.
The example of poker in film and TV mirrors the spike in interest in it that happened in the 21st century. With the introduction of online poker and hole-card camerasit became a spectator sport and something you could do from the comfort of your own home.
With this spike and the ability to make it a spectator sport many poker tours emerged, including World Poker Tour and European Poker Tour, both of which were televised.
They then launched two new events; The Nations Cup which was held on the London Eye and The Table which featured 130 of the best poker players in the world.
To Conclude:
Poker is an interesting game and I can see why it has mass appeal. However, can someone please explain to me the appeal of online poker? Apart from the fact you don’t have to get out of the chair by your computer or off your bed with your laptop why would you gamble with people whose faces you can’t see? Does that not defeat the whole point of trying to read peoples tells and take away a large part of the whole psychology of the game? Correct me if I’m wrong.
Also, we all know Casinos fix games in their favour (and who can blame them? It would’t make a very good business if they didn’t) but to gamble online in any form is surly to leave yourself open to an even larger con? I could write a fixed version of any gambling game as a computer program in like a day and I’m a bad programmer. With poker there’s less of a fear of this because everyone playing is supposed to be a real person and there is no “house” to take the money… Eccept how do you know all these people are real and one of then isn’t the “house” and the game isn’t fixed in their favour? I’m half tempted to write a fixed version of poker, put it online, and see how many people I could convince to play it… Except then I could be arrested for all kinds of things… But it would make for a rather interesting experiment/business… But anyway, I have digressed.
Back to the point, poker is a good game, if you don’t know how to play it, learn as undoubtedly you’ll be somewhere with some people and they’ll be like “lets play poker” and you’ll be that one person who doesn’t know how to play and they’ll “teach you” but in that way where you only ever really pick up half of it.
Switch is one of the many versions of Black Jack around, we aim to cover them all between now and eternity, but that could take years, so don’t hold your breath for any exciting Blackjack posts any time soon. I think this game is good because it’s simple, can be played anywhere, and is very quick.
What’s In The Box:
Well, as it would transpire…. Nothing! All you need to play this game is a standard deck of cards, and at least two willing people.
Playing The Game:
Objective: To be the first to play all the cards in your hand.
So to start the game each player is dealt a hand, usually of seven cards. The remaining cards are placed face down in the middle of the table, and the top card is drawn to determine how play starts. If the top card is a Power Card, then another card is drawn until a card is revealed that has no other purpose in the game. The starting player (typically left of the dealer) should then find in their hand a card that matches either the suit or the rank of the face up card. If a player cannot play a card from their hand they must draw cards from the deck until they can.
The starting set up for Switch. Appreciate our custom made cards!
Power Cards:
2 – if a player places a two in their turn the player next to them then has to draw two cards, unless they have a two in their hand, they can then play this and make the player next to them pick up four cards. This can continue round players until all four twos are played if possible, forcing the last player to pick up eight cards. The player that has to draw cards also forfeits the right to play any cards that turn.
Twos!
7 – a seven must be covered, so the person who played it must put another card of the same suit over it, or pick up a card if they cannot. If they pick up the next player must then cover the seven, or draw a card, this continues until someone has managed to cover the card.
Sevens!
8 – when played eights make the next player miss their turn. There is an optional rule that allows that player to also play an eight, passing the missed turn on in the same way stacking two’s works, with the last player who cannot play an eight missing the same number of turns as there are eights in play.
Eights!
10 – reverses the direction of play.
Tens!
Black Jacks – a black jack is similar to a two, when it’s played the next player must pick up five cards or play the other black jack, which would then make the next player pick up 10 cards.
BLACKJACKS!
Red Jacks – a red jack can be used to cancel out a black jack, if two black jack’s are in play then to cancel them both you must play both red jacks.
Redjacks!
Ace – an ace can be played onto any card, irrespective of suit or value, whoever played the ace then chooses which suit play will continue in, and the game carries on, but with the new suit instead of whatever was being played before.
Aces!
Winning The Game!
The first player to play their last card immediately wins the game. However, to win you must call LAST CARDS as soon as you are able to go out, this must be noticed by other players. If you fail to do this and then play your last card you must pick up another card. Play also cannot end on an Ace, if you finish with an Ace you must pick up another card.
History and Interesting Things:
There’s not a lot of history going on for this game, but there are a few entertaining things I can tell you:
There’s a variation of the game called Peanuckle in which player with only two cards left in their hand must say “peanuckle”, and a player with only one card left must say “supper-peanuckle”. I have no idea why this is, but this is the way of it.
There are loads of variations of Black Jack, most of which are played in Casinos around the world, like 21 Blackjack, also known as Pontoon.
We were familiar with this game before we decided to write about it, but the variation we’d previously played had slightly different rules and Power Cards.
Three points is two more than I thought I’d write, so I’m doing well!
To Conclude:
A good game, I like it a lot because it’s easy to learn and you can play it anywhere with anyone. I also like that there are so many variations of it, makes it always interesting to play. Although, because there are so many variations of the game it can lead to interesting disputes over Power Cards and rules regarding winning the game. We played with a bunch of people when we were in Brazil and we had three different ideas of what the rules should be. There had to be a little bit of universal rule deciding before we could start playing.
The most comprehensive information I found on this game was on Wikipedia, but most of it’s in this blog post. Annnnnnnd, yeah, that’d be about it, have fun playing cards!
I’m writing this post because the last review post (Spartacus: A Game of Blood and Treachery) before this was our 50th post! YAY! Also March was full of marker stones; we passed 1000 views (and then 1600), we gained 40 followers (and then 47), 3 months of meeting deadlines without failure (please don’t jinx it), over half a year of blogging, our highest view/visitors in one day record so far… And our highest amount of views in one month by quite a lot!
Now, to some of this, you might go “HA! it’s taken them over half a year to even have 1000 people look at their blog” well to you I say… It’s a board game blog, not exactly current events or something with fire in it. We understand that in many respects what we blog about is quite niche and probably not something people will want to read every post of. It’s more likely that people will find the posts when they’re looking up particular games (or at least we hope so) which makes subscribing to our blog less likely than say, a blog on food or sport. So the 1000 marker stone is quite a big one for us, especially when you consider we’re not the only people existing in this niche, there are many other board game review sites/blogs that make cool exciting videos (we’re working on that) not to mention Board Game Geek which dominates the landscape for all board game knowledge.
So really what I’m saying to anyone reading this is thanks a lot! It’s very encouraging to see progress, to see that, even though it’s slow, you’re making progress, the amount of views we get per day is steadily increasing. We haven’t had no views in a day in a very long time and getting less than 5 is now rare. We’re well on our way to 2000 views, in the same month that we hit 1000, that’s pretty nice going. You could say “Don’t judge it all by the statistics” but what’s the point of writing if no one reads it? The statistics let us know someone’s reading, and that means there’s point in writing.
This month is going to be Card month! Yes I know there are enough card games in existence to fill a whole blog just with card games but we’ve picked a few of our favorites, a couple of classics and a couple of less classics, and perhaps we’ll do another card month next year and do a few more games. Also these posts will probably be quite short in comparison to our other posts as the games are mostly quite small and simple in comparison.
All the Games for this month…and our awesome card shuffler…if you don’t have one get one. Also our awesome custom Tame the Board Game cards.
As you may have noticed we’ve added a picture of all the games of this month to this update, this will now be a common thing with every update post.
Rules to our very own card game Crush the Crown will be going up sometime this month (hopefully) and we’ll be asking for feed back. All you need is a standard deck of cards and a friend so get ready!
Also we have gone back through all our old posts and added our ratings of them and updated the games we have page accordingly.
This month we’re also thinking of starting to hyper-link inside the posts so from an index at the top you’ll be able to jump to any section of the posts. We hope this will make the layout more accessible.
Penultimate we have to put a huge thanks out to grognard.com who are a website all about war games! Thanks to them posting our posts our viewing has gone through the roof this month and there’ll be a post specifically on that tomorrow. So go check them out.
Because of this we have decided to: a) include links to other suggested reviews of that game in out posts from now on (if there are any) and b) in the update post for each month a few links of websites that will be worth checking out inline with that months theme. So below this you’ll find some suggested sites.
Sites on Cards:
Pagat.com – For any and (mostly) all card game rules for any games you wanna play.
Card Game Reviews Blog – Not the most imaginative name for a blog but a solid site for card game reviews and somewhat fitting after my comment: “there are enough card games in existence to fill a whole blog just with card games”.
And because of this you get cards with things like this written on them:
This did make us laugh… A lot.
Now unfortunately, being a big fan of the TV series this review is unlikely to be completely non- biased, I will however do my best to stay objective.
What’s In The Box:
The Stuff!
Game board
Rules Book
4 x House cards
62 x Market Cards
104 x Intrigue Cards
10 x Favor/Injured tokens
4 x Champion tokens
3 x House betting tokens (per house) and 1 x House marker (per house)
1 x Host marker
117 x Gold
4 x Gladiator figures
4 x Turn summary cards
A lot of Dice (9 x Red, 9 x Black and 8 x Blue)
Playing The Game:
Objective: Be the first to raise your house influence to 12!
Depending on whether you want to play a Quick, Standard or Advanced game you set the starting amount of influence each house has to a different number:
Quick = 7
Standard = 4
Advanced = 1
Starting influence is set to 7 for a quick game and the starting amount of things dealt out.
You then get dealt the starting number of items as dictated by your house card (circled green). So for Solonius that’s 2 Gladiators, 2 Slaves, 1 Guard and 12 Gold. Additionally each player gets one gladiator figure, their 3 house betting tokens and a turn summary card.
Now, every turn of play is made up of four sections:
Up Keep
Intrigue Phase
Market Phase
Arena Phase
Up Keep:
Up keep consists of three parts:
Refreshing Cards – Any cards that have been exhausted in the previous round (so are face down) get turn back up so their abilities can be used again.
Healing Injuries – Attempt to heal any injured gladiators or slaves by performing a healing role – on a role of 4 – 6 they are healed anything less and they stay inured.
Balancing the Ledgers – You gain one gold for every ready slave you have and you must pay one gold to the bank for every ready gladiator you have – if you cannot pay (or don’t want to) you must discard the card that’s making you pay.
Intrigue Phase:
Intrigue consists of two parts:
Drawing Cards – At the start of each intrigue phase each player draws three intrigue cards (players all receive three cards simultaneously).
All Intrigue cards dealt.
Playing Schemes/ Foiling Schemes/ Cashing in Cards – Some of the intrigue cards are schemes you can play against another Dominus (Latin word for master), cards that allow you to foil other schemes or get rid of an opponents guards. To play a Scheme you must have the right amount of influence to play it (as listed on the card), if you don’t you can pair with another Dominus to play it by adding your influence together but beware; deals that are made can be easily broken. If someone plays a scheme against you you can foil it by using your guards and performing a dice role or you can play a scheme foiling card that are reactions to schemes and also require that you have the right amount of influence to play it. Finally if you don’t want some of you cards or can’t keep them (as your had size is dictated by the amount of influence you have) you can cash in cards for the amount written on them from the bank.
Market Phase:
This phase is made up of three parts:
Open Market – At this point anything can be traded for anything for anything else. Except Intrigue cards, which cannot be sold.
Auction – After open market is over each player conceals their gold in their hand and cards equal to the amount of players playing are drawn face down on to the board. The first card is flipped up; each player decides how much they want to bid for that card and hide it in their hand and hold it out over the board, then together they revel how much they have bid, highest bidder wins. Someone who bids nothing is ignored, but if everyone bids nothing the card is discarded. If there is a tie the two players who are tied place the amount they have already bid on the board and repeat the procedure until one player is victorious. This is then repeated with each card until all cards are sold or discarded.
Bid for Hosting – This is done in the same way as the bidding for the cards. The person who wins the host bidding gets the Host token and it marks that they control the next phase of the game and choose who will fight who.
Arena Phase:
This phase is made up of six parts:
Honour to the Host – The player that won the hosting rights in the auction gets +1 influence.
Hosting the Event – The host then invites two players to take part in the games (they can invite themselves). If a player declines they lose one influence. If they accept they place their gladiator figure in the arena in the starting position then place the card of the gladiator they are fighting, along with any Weapons or Armour they are also using.
A starting gladiator ready to battle.
Tribute – The owners of the gladiators are then paid tribute if their gladiators have favour or are champions – +2 gold for each favour token and +6 gold if they are a champion. If they don’t have any favour and are not champions they get nothing.
Place Wagers – It’s then time to place wagers, you can wager on who will win (competing players can’t wager against themselves) and how they will win (injury or decapitation). Three is the maximum wager on any one wager and the wagers you place are marked by putting you house wager tokens on top of your pile of gold on the wager you have made.
So a bet on combatant one to win returns 1:1 odds so you can double your money.
A bet on the fight ending in injury returns 2:1 odds so you triple your money.
Combat! – Now the fight begins. Each fighting gladiator has statistics for Attack, Defence and Speed. They are given as many red dice as their attack statistic, as many black dice as their defence statistic and as many blue dice as their speed statistic:
3 Attack = 3 red dice, 2 Defence = 2 black dice and 2 Speed = 2 blue dice.
Each player then roles their total amount of speed dice to determine who moves first, the player with the highest total wins and decides who moves first. Your total number of speed dice dictates how many spaces you can move; so if you have two dice you can move two spaces. You can chose to move and then attack or if you’re already adjacent to your enemy you can attack and then move away. Once adjacent you attack by rolling your attack dice while the defender roles their defence dice. You then line the dice up from highest to lowest, opposite each other. Any place where one attack dice is a higher number than the defence dice is a hit and any place where a defence dice is higher than the attack dice is successfully defended. If they’re equal it’s also a successful defence. Where attack die outnumber defence dice any additional roles that have no matching dice count as a hit so long as they are three or above.
Two warriors ready for combat.
The dice are your health; so for each hit that is obtained the taker of the hit decides which dice to get rid of, lowering their attack, defence or speed for the next move. All attributes must be reduced to 1 before any can be completely removed. If one is completely removed then the player has yielded, if two are reduced to zero in one attack the player is wounded and if all three are reduced to zero in one attack the player is decapitated.
Victory and Defeat – The winning Dominus gains one influence. The winning gladiator revives one favour token, if it’s his third favour token he becomes a Champion. Wagers are then settled with the bank. If the loser was not decapitated the host of the games decides if he lives or dies with the thumbs up or down signal. To kill a loser who has favour will cost the hosting Dominus 1 influence per favour token and champions cannot be killed.
After all this the turn phases are repeated unless one player has a full 12 influence at this point, then they’re the winner! If they have reached 12 influence before this point they are not yet the winner as they can still lose influence before the turn of play is over.
Strategy:
MONEY IS POWER! Like in real life. If you are a broke Lanista (trainer of Gladiators) then you are a rather useless Lanista.
UNDERSTAND WORTH! Linked to the first point, knowing what/how much to bid for something in this game is everything. Knowing what you need and what’s not worth buying (at that time) will be the key to winning and losing.
HOST THE MOST! Bidding to be the host is always worth it, not only does it automatically give you influence you then have control too.
KNOW YOUR FRIENDS! While this is a rather back stab-y game it’s important to know the people you’re playing with and understand when they’re likely to stick with you and at what point they will abandon you and leave you to be eaten by dogs.
KEEP THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE! With such a large turn phase to the game it’s very easy to get caught up in just one round or one arena match and forget about the bigger picture and larger aim. Everything you do should be in aid of the bigger picture not just to get back at another player or just because you want to see a fight between two cool Gladiators.
History and Interesting Things:
While the board game itself does not have much notable history (at least nothing I can find) the historical events it’s based (very loosely around) do so that’s more what this section is going to contain.
The board game is only based on the first season of the TV show Spartacus: Blood and Sand, it being the only season in which Spartacus is a Gladiator rather than a rebel.
While historical facts on the war are highly debated it is often interpreted as a rebellion of oppressed people rising up against a slave owning oligarchy.
Historically Spartacus (the man) is supposed to have lived from 109 BC – 71 BC. The characters Crixus,Oenomaus, Castusand Gannicus, are also historically verified people who assisted in the uprising.
He was born a Thracianand supposedly died on the Battlefield near to Petelia (modern-day Strongoli, Calabria, Italy) as depicted in the TV show and film (probably without the “I’m Spartacus” fiasco).
This being Appian also that his body was never found.
6000 survivors of the battle where crucified alongside the Appian Way from Rome to Capua as depicted in the final episode of the TV show with the crucifixion of Gannicus.
Andy Whitfield who played Spartacus in the first season Spartacus: Blood and Sand (who’s face should be on the front of the game box rather than his replacements Liam McIntyre) sadly died on September the 11 2011 of on-Hodgkin lymphoma and the series was literally less than half as good without him.
While my obvious like for the TV show has made this review at least slightly biased I would still maintain this game is a good game by anyone’s standards. It is, however perhaps a touch complex and drawn out. For example; cancelled down version of just the gladiator battles would have made quite a good game just in itself. So this game is primarily for the patient and those who are naturally enthusiastic about games not for those who think monopoly is the epitome of (board) gaming.
Create the Best Civilisation and become King of Catan!
Okay, you don’t actually win the title “King of Catan” if you win the game, but it’d be cool if you did. Instead, you just win the sheer joy of winning, which is almost as good. Settlers of Catanis a brilliant game, primarily for its simplicity and versatility. Because of the way the board gets set up, no two games are ever going to be the same and it’s got so few rules that anyone can learn to play!
What’s In The Box:
The stuff!
19 Terrain Hexes and 6 Sea Frame pieces – set up in one possible arrangement for play.
9 Harbour Pieces
18 Circular Number Tokens (chits)
95 Resource Cards (19 each of Stone, Sheep, Clay, Wood and Grain)
25 Development Cards
4 “Building Costs” Cards
2 Special Cards
16 Cities (4 each in Orange, White, Red and Blue)
25 Settlements (5 each in Orange, White, Red and Blue)
60 Roads (15 each in Orange, White, Red and Blue)
2 Dice (one Yellow, one Red)
1 Robber
1 Game Rules and Almanac Book
Playing The Game:
Objective: To develop your civilization fastest in order to gain 10 Victory Points and win the game!
Setting up the Board:
To start the game you set up the board so it looks more or less like the photo below. You give a few of the Terrain Hexes to each player. They’re then laid out in that honeycomb kind of pattern, and edged with the Sea Frame pieces. There’s no set layout for the beginning of the game, so the hexes you get given can be placed anywhere. Once the board is set up each player chooses a colour and takes all the Cities, Settlements and Roads for that colour. They also take the Building Costs card of that colour. Then the Circular Number Tokens are placed on the board. These tokens all have both a number and a letter on them, numbering from 2-12, missing only 7, and having the respective letters A-R. One player then chooses a starting tile, and places the Token with A on it. The other tokens are then laid out in alphabetical order moving clockwise around the board. One of the Terrain Hexes is the desert, this is the only Hex which doesn’t have a token placed on it.
Starting set up for the game.
Once that’s been done, the grey Robber figure is placed on the desert Hex, and each player can then place two of their Settlements, and two Roads on the board. Settlements (and later Cities) are always placed on the corners of the Hexes, so your Settlement will be on the point on a Hex where two or three Hexes meet. Roads must be placed on the edges of Hexes and connected to a Settlement or City of their colour. To start, your Settlements can be placed anywhere on the board, but following this they must always be connected to a previously existing Settlement by a road. To start each player collects one Resource card for the tiles they have Settlements on, for example, at the start of the game above, White would receive two Stone cards, one Clay, one Wood and one Crops.
Turns:
A players turn is divided up into the following phases:
Rolling the dice, moving the Robber and collecting Resources
Trading Resources with other players or the bank
Building Roads or Settlements, upgrading to Cities and buying Development Cards
Rolling the dice always happens first, and the number rolled reflects which Resources will be produced on that turn. There are two Number Tokens for each number that can be rolled, apart from 12, once the dice are rolled, find these, and anyone with a Settlement on the corner of the corresponding piece receives one Resource card for that tile. On a roll of 7 no Resources are produced, and the Robber’s moved. The player that rolled the dice can now put the Robber wherever they like. If placed on a tile, the Robber prevents any Resources being produced for this tile until someone else rolls a 7 and moves him, so he can be a huge inconvenience to your opponents.
Like this:
Here the Robber was preventing me from receiving any Sheep Resources
Next you can trade Resources. This is done verbally and with the exchange of cards. One player simply states which Resources they need, and what they’re prepared to offer for them, and other players may accept or decline. Or haggle, if they feel so inclined. if a player has a lot of one Resource they can trade five of one Resource in to the bank, in exchange for one different Resource of their choice. If a player rolls a 7 all players must also count how many cards are in their hand, if they’ve got more than 7 Resource cards in their hand they must discard half of them, in the case of an odd number, for example, 9, you round down, so you would only discard 4, not 5.
It’s also possible to use the Sea Ports to trade resources, but you have to have a Settlement or City built on one of the three points adjacent to a port to use it.
Finally you can build things, your Building Costs card tells you how much each thing will cost you in Resources, and you discard Resources into the Resource bank to build on the board or buy Development Cards. Settlements or Cities must be connected by at least two roads, so they cannot be on the points next to each other, meaning that only three Settlements can ever be on one Hex. You must also have a connecting road before you can build a Settlement.
Play continues like this until one player has gained 10 Victory Points!
Winning the Game!
Winning the game actually isn’t very difficult, each Settlement you build is worth 1 Victory point and each City is worth 2. So you start the game with 2 Victory points, for your two Settlements placed before game play starts. You can also gain an extra 2 Victory points for having the longest unbroken road, this is one of the Special Cards, and is awarded once a player has a road at least five segments long. However, this card can get passed around a bit, as other players build longer roads. In the game we played, I had the longest road:
I was Orange, my road was 8 segments long
So I got the extra Victory points on the Special Card:
Longest road!
So, the end of our game looked like this:
I win!
So, ignoring the tea, ice cream and small rubber duck, this is what the game looked like at the end, I had acquired here, Longest Road, Largest Army (which is the other Special Card, Knights can be acquired by buying Development Cards and you get Largest Army once you’ve got three) and then also some Cities and Settlements.
Strategy!
This game can be played strategically, at the start of the game, when the board is being arranged, look for areas where a lot of one resource are concentrated, if you build both your starting Settlements on these and then quickly expand your Roads you can create a monopoly on one resource, forcing other players to trade with you for whatever you demand. Alternatively, try and build you Settlements so that you get as many different resources as possible. Both these are acceptable ways to start the game. One thing I would say to not do is this: unless you’re going for monopoly on something DO NOT BUILD YOU SETTLEMENTS CLOSE TOGETHER TO START. Doing this is going to severely inconvenience you later in the game. It makes getting Longest Road, or heading out to resources on the other side of the board much harder. Also, don’t be too harsh with trading, if you have something another player desperately needs, don’t ask too much for it, as they might get annoyed, and refuse to trade something you really need later in the game. It’s all a question of balance, getting as much as possible out of the trade without being unreasonable.
History and Interesting Things:
One of the first European games to achieve real popularity outside of Europe – it’d sold over 15 million copies by 2009.
There are over 50 Scenarios and Variants now available for this series of games.
Die Siedler von Catan is a novel, set on the island of Catan, written by Rebecca Gablé following the popularity of the initial release of the game.
Settlers has been created and recreated online over the years – it used to be playable over MSN, for everyone out there who remembers when MSN was the going thing!
A series of mini stuffed animals based on the resources produced in the game was released by Mayfair, call Catanimals.
A version of the game to be played on Nintendo DS was announced in 2008, but has yet to be released.
To Conclude:
This game has a rating of 5 because of how versatile it is, and how easy it is to play, the rules have little to no ambiguity in them, the storage space in the box is well laid out and therefore not annoying, and it’s a really, really fun game to play, which takes between an hour and an hour and 40 minutes, more or less. Which I think is an almost perfect running time for a game, long enough to be interesting, without becoming boring! It’s a brilliant family game too, as the simplicity of the rules allows for younger players!
Tame The Board Game 