Trick taking games have been around for quite a while. I’m not sure how old games like euchre and bridge and whist and pinochle have been around but they’re been around long enough to become social institutions that people devote their social lives to and ruin their marriages over. However, a lot of modern game designers have given trick taking games their own twists and Bottle Imp is one of them.
Bottle Imp is an older game by the standards of the modern gaming era but it hasn’t been available in English until this year. Thanks, <PERSON>!
Here is the short review: Buy this game. If you even have a vague interest in card games, buy Bottle Imp. It’s cheap. It’s fun. It’s brilliant. It’s so small you can sneak into the house in your back pocket and hide it in the sock drawer where your husband or wife won’t find out you snuck another game into the house.
I went through the trouble of picking up an international copy some years back and I have to say that Bottle Imp is one of the better light trick taking games I have played. It does not have partners or bidding, which is why I am calling it a light game but it does have one of the most diabolical trump rules I have ever seen.
The game consists of a deck of 37 cards, one of which actually is never going see play. The deck is numbered one through thirty-seven and is divided up into three different suits. Yeah, that’s right. The suits are not identical. In fact, they are completely different since they obviously share no numbers with each other. For the record, the yellow suit tends to be the lower cards, the red suit the higher cards and the blue suiteare around the middle. However, they are spread out through the deck.
Nineteen is not actually a real card. It’s just a place holder for the bottle. In older editions, you actually get a real wooden bottle but the bottle is just another card in the Z-Man version. Hey, you can find the game for under ten dollars without even looking hard. Quit your whining.
At the start of a round, you deal out all the cards. Players do a chance to fiddle with their hands a bit. 581
One card goes under the bottle, serving as a penalty for whoever ends up with it. (Don’t worry, I’ll explain that later.) You pass one card to the left and another to the right. So, if you feel totally hosed by the luck of the draw, you get to share a little bit of that love.
The game follows most of your standard trick taking conventions. Someone leads, you must follow suit if you can, high card takes the trick. If you’ve played any trick taking games, you know how all this works. If you haven’t, buy the game anyway since it’s great and you can learn.
Now, at this point, you’re saying "Yeah? So?" Ah, but that is because I have saved the best and most evil for last. You see, trump in Bottle Imp is NOT a suit. It’s a number! <PERSON> is the highest card that is lower than the last card that took the bottle. The bottle starts at 19 as a place holder. You take the trick AND the bottle, which goes on the card that took it so no one can forget the current ‘price’.
However, if you’re holding the bottle at the end of the game, bad things happen to you. Everyone else gets to score the cards they won. The bottle holder throws out all the cards they won and SUBTRACTS the value of the cards that everyone put under the bottle at the start of the round.
You can play to a set number of points or rounds. Kind of goes without saying that whoever has the most points when the game is over wins.
Bottle Imp gets its name from the wonderful <PERSON> story. In that, the bottle imp can grant you your dreams but if you die with the damn thing, you get dragged straight to Hell, even if you’re <PERSON>. You can’t give the bottle away. You got to sell it but you always got to sell it for less than you bought it for. Part of the plot involves the characters using exchange rates to sell the bottle for currencies that are worth less.
Take a look at the rules of the game. Guess what. They fit the story perfectly. It’s crazy how well the theme works.
And, in case I haven’t mentioned it, Bottle Imp is a great game. The deck is small enough that tracking cards isn’t that hard. 629