Arghhh Shiver me deductions! A review about PLUNDER

Won my 1st game.. Wheee!

I have begun to like deduction games. Deduction does appear in numerous games that I play but often they are not the main mechanisms. Recently I have been playing more games where deduction is the main draw of the game and I must say its beginning to grow on me. Roy brought over his game of Plunder and it has been a blast! Its easy to pick up, teach and play but for a light filler game, trying to win it by guessing your opponents' cards is not a straight forward process and does require quite a bit of thinking to get it right.

At the start of the game, each player will receive 1 green, 1 blue and 1 red card, which each range from 1 to 6. This will indicate the combination that each of your opponent is trying to guess. No other opponent will have the exact same combination as you. Now the game begins. There are 15 rounds to the game and at each round, 1 player will flip over 1 card from each deck of the same color. This will randomly show 3 numbers. The player then decides if he wants to flip over 1 more card of any of the 3 colors. Once he has decided, each player in turn order after him will say "AYE" if at least 1 of the cards correspond in both color and number to the initial 3 he has received, or "NAY" if all cards do not correspond. Players will then indicate the answers onto a player board with the provided marker pens. This will constitute 1 round.

The next player will start the next round by flipping 3 more cards and performing the same action. This will repeated until 15 rounds have been done. During the game at any time, players can mark their final guesses of his opponents' loot onto his own Guess cards and deposit them into the treasure chest box in the middle to lock in their guesses. When the game is over, take the cards in the box and flip them over so the first guesses are revealed and evaluated.

Players open their loot cards and each Guess card is evaluated. If a player guesses an opponent correctly, that opponent will mark a cross in the row marked as his treasure. The treasure numbers from 6, 3, 1 and 0. So you cross them out from 6 to 0. That means if 3 other opponents managed to guess your loot correctly, you will score 0 points. If you are the first to guess your opponent correctly amongst the other players, then you will score 3 points. Second correct guess will score you 2 points and Third correct guess will score you 1 point. After all Guess cards have been resolved, players add up their points to get the final score and the winner is the player with the most points.

Lousy 2nd game

How was the game? As mentioned it was surprisingly a whole lot of fun. You could play it 2 ways. One could be slow and steady where each round is played at a moderate pace. You could play it in such a way where the clues are all obtained first and then lets see who can process all the information quickly though this may not really be the proper way to play. There is even strategy involved. When you see the flipped over cards and 2 of the cards are identical to your loot, do you want to continue with it so you can confidently pinpoint who has the 3rd card? Or do you want all 3 different numbers? If you have already guessed one of the numbers, do you want to flip 1 more card over to give you even more clues? You should also pay attention to what other players are choosing to do during their turn (flip over an extra card or not) as it may give you clues as to what their own loot cards are. It is certainly impressive how such a little game can give you so much replayability and a whole lot of fun while wrecking your brains at the same time.

Do take note though that perhaps you may want to give players a clue as to how to mark the answers on their player boards because apparently how to do it actually stumped SOME people *wink at my cohost*.

Plunder, a surprisingly fun deductive game that plays 2-6 and takes about 20-30 minutes, depending on how long players take to make their final guesses. Recommended!