Tax the Rich

• Designers: Kristian A. Ostby and Kjetil Svendsen
• Publisher: Alion
• Players: 3-6
• Age: 14+
• Time: 20 mins
• Amazon affiliate link: 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Climb the social ladder — or kick it over.

The trick-taking game Tax the Rich features a deck depicting characters of various social ranks from the Poor to the President. Each round begins with a simple bidding phase to determine both the trump color and the number of tricks required to score bonus points. The winner of the bid must then acquire the required number of tricks, together with their ally.

The game is played as a trick-taking game in which the highest social ranks are the strongest cards. However, if at any time all remaining cards in your hand have a flag symbol, you may trigger a “revolution” by revealing your cards. This flips the social hierarchy upside down so that the lowest-ranked cards become the most powerful. Having called for a revolution, you stand publicly exposed, playing the rest of this round with your cards face up.

The game includes thirteen rule cards that add variety by giving certain character cards special abilities related to their profession: Workers “unionize”, the Billionaires “power grab”, the Police “stop and frisk”, Scientists “debunk” etc. You can play with random rule cards or use one of the scenarios suggested in the rules.

With an optional variant, players can also collect cards with a feminist icon to trigger a feminist revolution, boosting the value of all female characters.

To start, set up the deck for your player count. Also decide if you’re going to play with the advanced variant rule cards or not. If you play with the rule cards, put a random rule card on the table at the start of each round.  You never remove rule cards, so you will play with 2 rules in the 2nd round, and with 3 rules in the third round.  

Shuffle the deck and then a starting hand out to each player (12 cards in a 4p game).  Place the box top on the table as it has the bidding chart on it.

Starting with the first player, a bid must be made by placing a marker on one of the four spaces on the lowest row on the bidding board.  Clockwise, players must then either make a higher bid or pass.  If you pass, you can jump back in the bidding later as your turn comes around again.   Keep bidding until players pass in a row. The player with the highest bid wins and becomes the Party Leader.  The Party Leader now announces any one card that they are looking for.  Whoever has the requested card shows it, and that player becomes the partner of the Party Leader. 

Now the game moves into a Trick Taking phase – with the first trick led by the player to the left of the Party Leader, but you cannot lead a President (rank 12) card unless it is the only rank left in your hand. The trick taking is “must follow”, and the trump suit is determined by the color of the winning bid.  If you win a trick with a Poor card (Rank 1), you can also steal a trick from any player who currently has the most tricks collected.  If multiple cards are played with the same number and rank, the earlier played one is stronger.

At any point, if you only have cards valued 1-3 in your hand (all helpfully noted with Red Flags on them), you can declare a Class Revolution.  You show your whole hand face up on the table and you must play the rest of the hand with your hand openly visible.  However, the rank order in the game is reversed, and the lowest number wins the tricks now.

There is also an advanced variant where you can call a Feminist revolution if all the cards in your hand are female (having the female icon on them).  You again show all your cards and play with an open hand for the rest of the round.  All Female cards have +10 to their value for the rest of the round.

Note – only one Revolution can be called per round.  Once someone declares one, that is the final change for the duration of that round.

When all the cards have been played, each player scores 1 point for each trick collected.  Also, if the Party Leader and partner have together collected at least as many tricks as the bid, those two players score the bonus points based on the current round of the game.  The game goes for 2 or 3 rounds, and the player with the most points wins the game.  If there is a tie, it is broken in favor of the player with the highest score in the final round.

My thoughts on the game

Tax the Rich is a game that started out slowly around here, and I was honestly not impressed at all with the game after my first play.  However, repeated plays have shown some interesting subtleties in the card play which have really raised my estimation of the game. 

To not bury the lede, Tax the Rich really relies upon the players understanding the values of the hands and having a tight bid for the President role.  In a sense, the game is pretty fragile in this regard.  If someone is able to get the President role with an easy-to-accomplish bid, there is not much suspense in the bonus points from the hand, and the amount is enough to sway the outcome of the game.   As the game only goes for two or three rounds, you can see how the bonus points can take on a huge role in the overall success or failure for a player.

When the bidding is pushed to a point where the outcome of the bid is uncertain, the game has a really nice amount of tension as all players are pushing to win the bonus points.  This is something which we did not fully appreciate in our first game – because there are so many different facets of the game which we only appreciated later.

A well timed Revolution is something which can be used to really change the flow of a hand.  Sometimes it completely upsets the way a hand was going; though a clever player might be able to use their high cards to win tricks and then leave themselves with a Class revolution hand and then scoop up the rest of the tricks with all their low valued cards.  

It is interesting that there are two different types of revolutions that can be called – because this prevents players from being able to fully count on their desired revolution from happening.  I will also note now that I make sure that everyone understands how a Feminist Revolution occurs because it’s based on the icon not the art on the card – this has gummed up more than one player’s grand strategy as we have played.

Though the teammates should be working fully together, the scoring system ensures that there is always a little bit of back-stabbing; as the winner of each trick earns a point, there are definitely times when a teammate will play over the winning card of their “partner” and scoop up an easy point.  This helps keep the gameplay lively and it can lead to some unexpected tricks late in the game as cards seem to come out at unusual times in the game.

There have been a lot of trick-taking games that have hit my table in the past 5 years (it feels like we’re still in a bit of a trick-taking renaissance), and Tax the Rich brings enough different things to the table to keep it coming back for now.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Joe Huber (1 play): OK, there’s a big caveat to my one play; we got the bidding rules incorrect.  While this undoubtedly made the game worse, I don’t think there’s a sufficient chance the game will be for me to be willing to revisit it.  One of the basic issues with card games is that some cards are very valuable, and others are not.  For me, the best card games tend to be those where the rules best balance out the value of the cards.  It’s never perfect, but (for example) the possibility of 0s becoming trump in Mü makes the lowest cards potentially important.  In Bridge, the strength of individual cards is somewhat balanced by the value of long and short suits.  Tax the Rich tries to do this, by offering the possibility of switching from the highest cards winning to the lowest, and this does add some potential value to low cards.  However, what we saw was that only the highest cards and sometimes the lowest cards mattered, because the odds of short suits was too high for the next card down (and to a lesser extent up) to matter.  There are just too many trick-taking games out there for me to want to spend more time on this one that doesn’t fit well with my taste.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, Craig M
• Neutral. Derek J
• Not for me… Joe H