Sandbag

• Designer: Ted Alspach
• Publisher: Bezier Games
• Players: 3-6
• Age: 15+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

You’ve joined a hot air balloon festival in which the goal is to go higher than your opponents. Dump as many sandbags as you can — and try to gain rockets as well! — to send yourself higher and higher to win.

Sandbag is a trick-taking game of avoiding tricks, manipulating trump, and reconfiguring your hand of cards. In each of the three rounds, you configure your basket with two face-up cards; the most common color among all players’ cards is the trump suit. Each trick, players either play from their hand, play a sandbag (to sluff, that is avoid winning the trick), or play one of their opponents’ face-up cards. During the round, it’s possible for the trump to change as the number and kind of face-up cards are exchanged for face-down sandbags. Five rocket cards worth negative points are in play each round, and you want to win these while avoiding the sandbag cards because in the end the player with the lowest score wins.

To setup the game, assemble the deck which will be 5 suits of balloon cards and some Rocket cards (the specific ones dependent on player count).   All the cards will be dealt out to the players, and then players simultaneously pass one card to each of their adjacent neighbors. With their new hand, each player now chooses three cards to play face down – two next to each other as their “Basket”, and one placed sideways underneath – called their Sandbag.  When everyone has done this, the two Basket cards are turned over and revealed.

The trump suit is the suit which is seen the most often amongst the face-up basket cards. If there is a tie for number of cards, the suit with the highest sum of cards showing is the trump. If the sums are tied, multiple suits are trump. The player with the highest trump card in their Basket leads the first trick.

The leading player can play a card from their hand, a facedown Sandbag card from their area or swap for any face up card from another player’s Basket.  Play goes around the table, and players generally must follow the led suit if possible – though players can play a Rocket card or facedown Sandbag card – even if they have the led suit in their hand.  Players can also swap cards, placing a card from their hand facedown in exchange of a faceup Basket card of another player – this newly acquired card must then be immediately played faceup.  (If you have exactly one card of the led suit in your hand, you could swap it and therefore not have to play that card…) After all cards are played, the trump color is determined, and it is the color seen most in the face up Basket cards on the table. The trick is won by the highest trump played, and if no trump played, by the highest color of the led suit. Sandbags are always facedown and can never win a trick.  If there is ever a tie (all players play Rockets or two cards of the same trump value), the earlier played card wins the trick.  The winner of the trick collects all the cards, placing them in a facedown scoring pile.  If any Rocket cards were visible in the trick, they can be set aside face up in a separate pile.

Continue playing until all players have played all their cards in their hand as well as their face down Sandbag cards, then each player scores for the hand (note that if all the Rocket cards are not seen, players should look through their facedown cards to find them and place them in their Rocket stack!):

• +1 point per face down balloon cards from the tricks they won and, if any, left in their basket
• -5 or -7 points per Rocket card (player count determines which value is in play) 
• Positive points for each face up balloon card in their basket

Do this twice more. In the second and third rounds, players get to play an additional facedown Sandbag card for every ten points (rounded down) of their current score.  The player with the fewest points at the end of the third hand is the winner!  Ties broken in favor of the player with the lower score in the final round.

My thoughts on the game

Man, this is an interesting trick avoidance game. Usually I’m a bit cold on trick avoidance, but I’ve played a number of games that use this mechanism in the past year, and I’ll admit that they are growing on me.  With the number of tricks in each hand (16 in the 3 player game), it’s virtually impossible to go the whole hand without winning a trick, but you just have to figure out when it’s now awful to do so…

Here, the scoring system actually might actually make it worthwhile for you to take a trick – as face up Rocket cards give a pretty big negative point bonus; generally offsetting multiple tricks. Furthermore, if you can stick an opponent (generally the leader) with a high valued Sandbag card in their area, they will have to take the penalty for it.

As you can guess, the decision on which Sandbag cards to play is interesting as is the decision later in the hand whether to swap for one or not.  You’d like to remove high value cards from your hand, but if you place them as Basket cards, you run the risk of taking a big penalty for them if nobody swaps for them.  Additionally, as the hand evolves, you might be able to cause someone else to unexpectedly take a trick by changing the trump color on them via a well-timed Swap.

In the course of the game, playing your Sandbag card is a great way to avoid taking a trick, or as a nice way to guarantee that you get out of the lead (except in the rare case where all players play a Sandbag).  And the game has a nice catch-up mechanism where you get extra sandbags for higher scores to start Rounds 2 and 3; though we have had at least one game where the leader after Round 2 was pretty much uncatchable – it wouldn’t have mattered how many sandbags the rest of us got.

Finding the Rocket cards at the end of the round can be a bit fiddly. To me it does seem a bit weird that a Rocket card played as a Sandbag still ends up giving you the benefit if you win the card.  But, the table just needs to remember how many Rockets are in each hand so that you know if they have all been accounted for.  But, in the end, everyone plays by the same rules, so it is what it is.

Rules – these are a bit disorganized to be honest.  There are a number of contradictions in the rules (especially concerning following suit and the exceptions that then follow).  The discussion of trump comes a few pages after you’re told that the start player is the one with the highest trump in their basket, etc.  The gameplay section starts with how to play cards, and then introduces a bunch of other rules including an example of a trick, but then goes 7 more pages before telling you in words how to win a trick (and then the explanation of what card wins a trick is a bit muddled as well…)   The initial part about playing cards tells you that you MUST follow the lead suit; but then a few pages later, tells you that you can play a Sandbag or a Rocket card, EVEN if you have the lead suit.  Egads.   In the end, all the rules are in the rulebook, but man, it took a couple of read throughs to get it all figured out.  The Swap rules could have also used a helpful example…   If you’ve played a trick taking card game in the past, you’ll likely figure everything out, but if this is your first one – umm, tread carefully and read all the online forums you can.  Or maybe watch a video.  I’m not one to watch videos, but they’re likely going to be more comprehensible…  One of the players in my group learned from the publisher at a con, so we felt pretty sure that we were playing the right game.

Sandbag is an interesting foray into the trick taking genre, and it is worth a look if you are inclined to that sort of game.  There are interesting decisions to be made and plenty of unexpected turns as each hand plays out once you figure out how the game is to be played.  I’d recommend watching a video or getting a demo of the game so that you can play the game as the designer/publisher wants you to play.

 Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Chris Wray
• I like it. Dale, Steph H, Mark Jackson
• Neutral. Justin, Jonathan
• Not for me…