Skull

Last night I added another entry to my 52 Games project when we played a few rounds of Skull after tea.

Skull is a simple bluffing card-game which can actually be played with regular playing cards or even marked beer mats (apparently). But the commercial edition is pretty so worth a purchase (even if you get someone else you know to buy it).

Each player gets a hand of four cards - three roses and one skull. A round consists of the players taking turns to place one card face down in front of them. The players continue doing this until someone can no longer play a card or until someone decides to challenge.

A challenge is declaring how many of the face-down cards you believe that you can turn over without revealing a skull. The next player can then either pass, or up the challenge, and this continues until all but one player has passed. That player has to then turn over the number of cards they declared.

If all of the cards are roses then the player wins that round. Win two rounds and you win the game. If you turn over a skull, you lose, and have to discard a random card from your hand.

And that's it. There are a couple of small rules in addition to that, mostly about how reveals are done, but it's a straightforward game. Obviously it's mostly about deciding when and where to play your skull and then bluffing your opponents into revealing it.

I can't remember how many round the three of us played, but honours went to either myself or Maya and were about even at the end.

(And if anyone is wondering, I am planning to play some miniatures games in the next few days - the 52 Games project isn't going to be entirely made up of fun but trivial board and card-games.)

52 Games - Game 13