Belladone Bluff

• Designers: Konstantinos Karagiannis
• Publisher: Lubee Edition
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

“Belladonna: plant in the Solanaceae family. Highly toxic, it can cause death. When properly dosed, its active substance is still used in modern medicine. To win a medical preparation, you need to add the seventh ingredient. But is it a cure with a positive score or a poison with a negative score? Face-up or face-down cards, calculation, memory and bluffing will enable you to win the game with more points than your opponent(s).”

Belladone Bluff is a card game, using a deck of 80 cards.  5 suits with values from -6 to +6, and each with 4 special action cards with a rank of 0.  The back of each card matches the suit color.  The deck is shuffled and each player is dealt 5 cards.  The rest of the deck is placed on the table.  The first 3 cards from the deck are flipped face up and placed in a column, thus starting three rows of cards on the table.  (If a zero card is drawn here, it is discarded and a new card is flipped up in its place).

On a turn, a player may play as many cards as they like to any one of the three rows – though there are the following restrictions:

• All the cards played this turn must be the same color
• Cards are played alternating face up / face down in a row
• Special action cards are activated when played face up; they have no effect when played face down
• The seventh and final card of the row must always match the color of the sixth card

When the player has finished playing, check to see if a row is complete.  If so, flip up all the cards, sum up the scores on the cards, and record the score on the score sheet for that player.  The row is then discarded and a card is flipped up from the deck to start anew.  The active player ends their turn by drawing back up to 5 cards in their hand.

It could be possible that a player cannot legally play.  If so, they do not play cards, though they have the opportunity to discard as many cards as they like and draw the same number of replacements from the deck.

There are four special action cards – which again only have action if they are played face up:

• Reverse: The score of this row is multiplied by -1 upon completion
• Handoff: the player who placed the 7th card must give the score to another player
• Target: all players may only play to this row of cards until it is completed
• Peek: The player who played this card can look at all the facedown cards, and optionally, can take one of the facedown cards into their hand and replace it with a card from their hand

The game continues until the deck is depleted.  At this point, the game will end when either a row is completed and scored or a player is unable to legally play to the table.  The player with the most points wins.  No tiebreaker is specified.

My thoughts on the game

I saw this  game while in a meeting at Essen… (shh, but the meeting was with another company!).  The artwork on the cards and the theme grabbed my attention for sure!  Being a physician IRL, anything with a medical or pharmaceutical theme is sure to attract me.

The game is pretty simple, and there are definitely plenty of twists and turns with all of the face down cards in the rows here.  The special actions also help spice things up and make the game that much more unpredictable (in a good way). 

As you only go through the deck once, you can certainly use your memory to aid you in predicting what cards are face down as the game progresses.  I surely can’t track 80 cards, but I can try to remember the -5 and -6s (as I’m more worried about avoiding a huge negative row than anything else in the game).  

I don’t track the special cards (yet), but maybe I should.  Each of the four types can be very effective when played at the right time.   However,  I am not sure I like the rule that you throw out a special card if it is flipped up randomly to start a row.  Why not just leave the cards in?  Everyone can see the card from the start and plan accordingly…  It’s probably not that big a deal, but I wasn’t quite sure why they had to be thrown out.  Maybe just make an exception for multiple target cards (as that’s really the only combination that wouldn’t just “work”). 

As I mentioned above, it was the visuals of the game that first attracted me to learn more about it, and most everyone I’ve played with has mentioned something similar.  The card quality is also nice – and overall, the whole game has a nice table presence.

The game is really fast, taking maybe 15 minutes or so if everyone knows the rules.  It’s been a nice closer to game night this month when we all have the itch to play “just one more game”.  There is plenty of luck involved (or educated guessing), and everytime we’ve played, there has been laughing and surprise when the face down cards are flipped over.   Also, interestingly, in my most recent game, one played managed to avoid taking a row until the very last play of the game – and managed to only be one point short of winning!  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral
• Not for me…