Oracle: Predict Your Tricks

• Designer: Marni Abramowitz
• Publisher: Indie Boards & Cards
• Players: 2-6
• Age: 14+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In this fresh new spin on trick taking, the tricks don’t matter—only your ability to foresee the future! Gaze into the future and predict your results to win!  Each round, roll the scrying dice to determine the rules for this round. Then, based on your hand and a single card from each of your opponents, you’ll predict both the number of tricks you’ll take and bet on how an opponent’s round is going to go. Winning or losing a trick means nothing, you only score through correctly divining the future. Push your trick taking skills to the limit. Become the one true Oracle!

To start, each player chooses a color and takes the player board and tokens that match.  The 44 Oracle cards (4 suits, 1 thru 10 and Ace) are shuffled and placed on the table.  The two reference cards are also placed on the table. Each round has three phases: Scrying, Prediction, Trick Taking.

Scrying – The start player will roll the three scrying dice which will then determine the rules for the round.   The trick die determines how many cards will be dealt to each player.  The power die determines the Power Suit for the hand.  Finally, the betting die determines what characteristic will be bet upon this round.   All players are now dealt their hand and then each player places their best card face up on the table in front of them – this is generally the highest ranked card in the power suit, and if there are no cards in that suit, the highest ranked card they have.  In the Scrying phase, Aces are always worth 11.

Prediction – now starting with the Start Player, each player predicts how many tricks they will win this round – though the bet must be between 1 and 5 inclusive. You can use the cards in your hand, the best card for each player that you can see as well as all of the previous bids.  Each player places a token of his color onto the betting board.  Next there is a second round of betting, now using the betting die.  Each player now places one of their markers in front of a player that they think will (make their prediction/miss their prediction/win the most tricks/win the least tricks).  You are allowed to pick yourself in this stage.  Once the bets are made, all players return their “best card’ to their hand.

Trick Taking – A mostly traditional must-follow trick taking game now happens.  The one change here is that when an Ace is played, the player must immediately declare if the Ace is worth 0 or 11. When all the tricks have been played out, the players score their bets.  For each correct bet, the player collects their marker and keeps it.  For each missed bet, the player puts their marker back in the box.  

The game continues until the end of a round when a player has put all their tokens back in the box.  At that time, the player with the most tokens remaining is the winner.  If there is a tie, those players play one more round to determine the winner.

My thoughts on the game

As readers of this blog will know, we really do like our trick taking games around here.  So, when I talked to Travis from Indie Board & Cards at Gen Con, this one quickly caught my eye.  In Oracle, the game is as much about the wagering as it is about the cardplay.   Each hand plays out differently given the variability in the dice rolls that set the rules for the hand.

I will say that when Oracle is at its best, it is a really intriguing card game.  Players want to try to make both of their wagers come true, and there have been some super interesting hands as we’ve watched things play out.  Usually, this happens with a higher hand size, bids that do not equal the number of cards, and a secondary wager that doesn’t involve taking the most/least tricks.  When that happens, I love Oracle.

But, as you can probably tell, the game doesn’t always turn out that way.  In a hand with 5 cards, with the players bidding 5 between them, and the wager going for the player who takes the most tricks – umm, the game is pretty darn processional.  Everyone has a vested interest in making the trick count turn out for their primary bid, and well, there isn’t much mystery in which player will likely take the most tricks in a 2-1-1-1 bid setup.    Because you only make your primary bid if you exactly hit your trick bid, there is very little incentive to try to screw up someone else’s trick count if that in any way jeopardizes your own bid.

Though we haven’t tried it yet, it feels like guaranteeing that the bids are never equal to the hand size would keep things more interesting. There would always be room for trick shenanigans, and it would make most of the most/least bids a little less on rails.   Alternatively, increasing the hand sizes would also make it less likely to be processional and would certainly make it much harder to predict how the tricks will play out.  Instead of a 5-8 range, 7 to 10 would definitely make it more variable.

That being said, we’ve been playing the game as written in the rules, and we have both good hands and bad hands.  Like I said, when it’s good, it’s really good – I just wish it was good more often.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor