inconsequential ruminations

Dia de los Muertos

My mother is Mexican and my family have always had a soft spot for the Day of the Dead. At my house, we have a weird Last Supper scene in papier mâché that has to be seen to be believed. Due to this, as soon as I saw Dia de Los Muertos, I knew I would find it hard to resist. I manfully bought higher rated card games beforehand, like Mü and Tichu, but in the end I succumbed to temptation. There is no way I was going to settle for the Four Dragons themed reprint, which is based in Chinese folklore.

I probably paid more than I should have for the original to be shipped from the States. The artwork is lovely and although amateurish, the cards are very thick and glossy. The rules are well written and clear, as you’d expect from a hardened gamer like Frank Branham.

The game was daunting to explain, as the mechanics are very quirky, but they fit surprisingly well together. In a nutshell, it is a trick-taking partnership card game, with lots of special cards. In three rounds, you have to capture low-ranked scoring cards in pairs. If you win a scoring card, your right hand opponent draws a card randomly from you and replaces it with one of his choice from his hand. The card distribution is weird, but there are player aids. You can only play to a trick if there is no other card of that colour in it, but you can play black cards to any trick. If you cannot play, you discard the card, which cannot be scored. The special cards are amusing. The weirdest is the one that lets you:

Ask any question about the contents of another player’s hand which can be answered by “Yes”, “No”, or a number.

Although Dia de los Muertos is complicated, it is not as skilful as others in the same category, like Mü, Tichu or even Oh Hell. There is no bidding and no card counting, as all won cards are displayed face up. I miss bidding, but I certainly do not miss the memory element. The game is more about learning how the suits and special cards interact and how to react to the situation.

I recommend Dia de los Muertos to anyone interested in deeper card games. It is now one of my favourites.

Verba Volant, Scripta Manent

We wanted a light closer and a friend asked for Perudo. I managed to convince them to try Verba Volante instead, which is basically Perudo but played with letter cards instead. We played with my Alpha Playing Cards.

The first player has to make a word from a hidden hand of five cards. They say what the word is and the next player has to either:

• accept the word, take the cards, discard one and draw one more and make a longer word OR
• challenge the word. If the word exists, the challenger gets as many points as cards. If it does not exist, the word maker gets the points and a new hand starts.

Picking this was a disaster, especially for me. I lost by a landslide. I did not make a single point, before my brother made 25 words. I could make excuses but ultimately I am bad at word games and lying. I am not ashamed about the latter.

I may be biased by my crushing loss, but I think this is a bad game because of:

1. downtime – there is nothing to do while players are making words.
2. randomness – you have to lie too quickly. We were forced to make long words from impossible hands too fast.
3. lack of thinking. If you are given a poor hand, because you fail to challenge a liar, you have to think of a lie fast, rather than trying to make something from nothing, otherwise you are too easy to spot as a liar.
4. no penalty for challenging. You lose no points, but you can gain some. Therefore if there is any doubt about another player’s word, you will challenge.

I admit that I dislike word games in general, but this is an especially poor one. I played Scrabble a year or so ago and was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it, but this was the opposite. Play Perudo instead.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 17th, 2005 at 17:26 and is filed under boardgames.