It's fun, but I'm not convinced how much the results have to do with determining the winner. It's like all that power, that power of deception, goes to their heads. Early on, lots of people get the crazy notion to make ridiculous bids. Early on, lots of people lay skulls and bluff just for the hell of it. Not as often as you might like, though.Ī curious thing about Skull is that the opening rounds are the most chaotic yet the most fun. Like a chase sequence from a horror film. There is nothing at all but the bluffing and the revealing and the tiny sounds of terror.īecause you choose other people's cards to reveal rather than just calling them out on a lie, that terror goes on and on. Yet there are no dice here, and no card draw. The astute will have spotted that Skull has a lot in common with Liar's Dice and its commercial variants like Perudo. Just to make sure you get another chance to bet when you don't really want to. Just to keep them one step away from winning the whole thing. Once someone's taken a hand, though, you'll have to bet. And it only takes two winning hands to take the whole game. But the stakes are higher than that because if you manage to get all flowers you win that hand. Lose all four and you're out of the game. The reason it's so scary is because if you find a skull you don't just lose the round, you lose a card. And if there's one thing I've learned from playing Skull, it's this: it's amazing how often good people make bad choices. No matter how bad it gets, the choice is yours. What can you turn over? What do you need to leave? What do they mean? Is that low whistle a warning or an appreciation of a cunning pick? Do you read that intake of breath as one of shock or anticipation? As the tension unspools like razor wire, each sound ramps it up until it becomes unbearable. After that it's up to you whose cards you want to turn over. So if you put down a skull yet placed a bet, others can catch you out with your own cleverness. The devil is in the fact that whoever wins the wager has to show their own cards first. Then you start wagering with other players to see how many flowers you think you can flip. Everyone starts with four cards, three showing flowers and one a skull. Ambiguous sounds uttered before a card gets flipped over and all hell breaks loose. It's often not the rules or the components that make a game.
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