Hell of a Deal

• Designer: Cameron Reid
• Publisher: Smirk & Dagger
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 90 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Hell of a Deal is a cooperative poker game against The Devil Himself & all the minions of Hell. Of course, they all cheat! To compete, you’ll have to cheat like Hell… and the more you do, the more doomed you all become. Welcome to The Last Resort & Casino… and winning IS your last resort. To get to the Big Table, you’ll face off against diabolical bosses like Dedly Aloor, Jack Potts, The Brothers Dreadful, & Roul-ette, each of whom twists the game in unique ways.

It’s real poker – as far as playing poker in Hell goes, with you all trying individually to beat the house. Every Boss changes how you will approach the hand and has a bare minimum hand to beat, should their dealt cards not pan out. It’s a Texas Hold’em style game – and players get not two but three cards dealt to them (one up their sleeve for more options). You may earn powerful Favor cards that let you cheat, like making a four-card Flush, but at the cost of a Curse or suffering Temptation.

Your chips will earn you Souls (the coin of the realm) which you’ll need at the Big Table against The Devil Himself – or betting one of your five Power chips will gain you immediate abilities, like revealing one of the Boss’s cards, or taking a face-up discard into your hand. But lose the hand and your wagered chips flip over to deliver harsh penalties. Suffer too much Temptation and the game ends in a loss. Manage to win against The Devil Himself and you might just earn your way back to the living.  It has the feel of high stakes poker, with no cash on the table. And delivers a whole Poker Night in just 90 minutes.

Place the Community mat on the table with the Favor cards, Curse cards and playing cards in the right spots.  Seed the Souls pot with one soul per player.  Each player gets a Temptation token placed on the 0 space of the track.  Assemble the Boss deck (4 regular bosses, Nick Hauss in the 5th spot, and a random Devil Himself as the 6th and final boss) and put this on the Boss space.  Each player gets their own player mat and a full set of Player chips.  Finally, each player gets a random Favor card which they can look at but otherwise keep secret.

The game will be won if the group can defeat the sixth and final boss.  Each round follows this general format:

Reveal the Boss – flip over the top card of the Boss pile, read the rules aloud for this boss.  Also note the minimum hand in the center of the card.

Resolve Curses – if players have face-down curses on their board, they now reveal them and then resolve all curses.  A player can not have more than 3 Curses.  If they were to take another one, they instead increase their Temptation by 1.

Deal Cards – unlike normal Hold Em, each player gets 3 Hole cards.  However, players should remember that they’ll only be able to use two of these cards for their final hand.  The Boss gets 2 Hold cards face down as well.

[Communication rules- during the hand, it is OK to talk about open information such as the cards that are revealed or the cards in the discard pile.  You cannot make any statements that use hidden information.]

Pre-Flop – based on only the hole cards, players must either Bet or Fold.  To bet, players use one of their unused betting chips from the bottom of their board and move it to the Bet Area on their mat.  Each betting chip confers a benefit (shown on one side) and a penalty that must be suffered should you lose the hand.   If a player has made a bet in this round, they can also choose to play a Favor card.

There are six different types of Betting Chips:

• Earn a Soul – if you win, gain a Soul chip.  If you lose, suffer a Temptation (move forward one space on the Temptation track)
• Heal Temptation – choose any player and move their Temptation token back one space. Note that you cannot go backwards through a fire wall at space 5 and 10.  If you lose, suffer 2 Temptation
• Devilish Offering – Use one of the four available Devilish Offerings (Reveal a Boss card, Look a 2 cards from the deck and keep 1, Swap a card with another player, Draw a card from the discard).  If you lose, suffer 2 Temptation
• Draw a Favor Card – take the top Favor card from the deck, you can hold up to 3.  If you lose, gain a curse
• Wild Chip – can be used as a duplicate for any chip, but you must pay an immediate 1 Temptation.  If you lose, gain a curse.

Flop – burn a card placing it face up in the discard area and then deal 3 cards face up to the board.  Again, players Bet or Fold

Turn – burn a card placing it face up in the discard area and then deal a 4th card face up to the board.  Again, players Bet or Fold

River – burn a card placing it face up in the discard area and then deal the 5th and final card face up to the board.  Again, players Bet or Fold.

Showdown – players who are still in (have not yet folded) now select their best possible hand using 1 or 2 hole cards and taking the rest from the Community cards.  The Boss also makes their best hand using at least one of their Hole cards.  If this does not beat the minimum hand shown on their card, they use that minimum hand instead.

Players that have beaten the boss collect 1 Soul for each Earn a Soul chip that they had bet.  Players that have lost to the boss (or folded earlier) flip over the chips that they have bet and suffer all the penalties.  Anyone who folded also must roll the Bones die and take the result of that as well (suffer a Temptation, gain a Curse, or Draw a Favor Card).  Finally, for each player that lost the hand, the group loses Souls as shown on the boss card.  There is no penalty to running out of Souls to a Regular boss, but if you cannot pay the penalty to either Nick Hauss or the Devil Himself, the group loses the game. The team also loses if they have 2 players at 10 on the Temptation track.  The team wins if they have at least one player defeat the final boss while not suffering a team loss.

My thoughts on the game

So I have serious mixed feelings about this – and in fact, we almost bailed our first game after 2 hands.  Why?  The game setup as proposed in the rules is brutally hard for newbies.  The first recommended bad guy is a juggernaut with a 10-high straight as his worst possible hand, and it’s (IMHO) a horrible setup for newbies to the game.  The first hand really wants to be a nice smooth game against say low two pairs so that everyone just has a chance to learn how to play the game and have a decent chance of winning, even if they haven’t figured out how to use any of the special cheating abilities.

Apparently, we’re not the only ones who have noticed this as the publisher has put some comments on BGG to address this issue:

“It is the game’s intention to be difficult. Not impossible, but difficult and we left room at the back of the rulebook for people to season to taste, making it more or less challenging. What the game does very well is deliver an edge of your seat, high-stakes poker vibe, without cash on the table. If you’ve ever played poker without cash, you know it can be terrible and very dull, especially Texas Hold em. So embrace its difficult nature.

• That said, it may be that Dedly Aloor was not a perfect choice for the first Boss of your first game, as his hand is significant (10,9,8,7,6). But remember, his ability is that he allows you to draw a whole bunch of cards if you like – and the first few are basically free. That’s because giving him some cards early (instead of taking Temptation) probably won’t make his hand any better than the default. You can afford to take a couple Temptation too if you need to. Those extra cards combined with Favors, Devilish Offerings and revealing and trading a card to sculpt someone’s hand will put a couple players in position to win.

That said, on reprint we will be changing the starting recommendation to: The Brothers Dreadful, The Boatman, Demona, Burnie. This starts the game with easier hands to beat. “

I’ve got no issue at all with a game wanting to be difficult – but man, if you make the first guy incredibly hard to beat, especially for people who don’t understand the nuances of the game, they’re not going to want to come back for more…  

Because of how bad we got slaughtered in our first foray into the game, I looked thru the BGG forums to make sure we weren’t doing anything wrong – and that’s when I found the above suggestion.  The next time out, we played with the new recommendation and we had a much more enjoyable game – one that came down to the final hand vs The Devil Himself, and our group won narrowly.

Once we started actually playing the game instead of getting crushed by it – there is a fairly neat puzzle going on.  The group has to try to figure out how to get some of the players past each boss in order to try to build up a bank of souls.  You’ll need lots of souls because the cost for losing against Nick Hauss or the Devil Himself is 4 souls, and you’ll need to have a nice bank in order to cushion your inevitable losses against those last two bosses.

Each player is on their own to craft a good hand, and there are some limited ways to help your partners (though with a limited communication game, you have to still be able to read your partners to suss out what they have or what they want).  For example, it’s a powerful move to swap cards with someone, but you can’t talk about the swap, so good poker skills are a must here.  It also helps for players to reveal some of their hole cards so that others can infer what they want.

This game is obviously different than regular poker because you’re not playing against the other players and your bets are against the system.  Also, while you can’t communicate your cards, you can make vague indirect statements about your cards, and that can also help people figure out where everyone stands.  Using your poker skills to figure out the odds is always helpful – though I’d caution people to not just rely on the math – there are so many ways to change things over the course of a hand that it’s more often worth it to stay in to see what happens rather than fold.  

The penalties on each bet chip are of course some deterrent to staying in; but you never know when a partner will swap a card with you and give you something or someone plays a Power card that causes an extra card to be added to the community pool, etc.  Also, as you can read the board, you have a bit more knowledge than in regular poker as you’ll know the minimum hand that the Boss will play – and you can use this to better feel your chance of success.

I do wish that there were more ways to be clever with the cards – such as ways to affect what is in the community cards.  There are some strong actions within the Favor deck, but it’s kinda luck of the draw whether you have the right card at the right time.  And speaking of the Favor cards, it has been suggested that the best play might be to always get a Favor Card as your first bet of each round.  If this is true, the developer in me asks why even make it an option – why not just have that be the mandatory pre-flop bet?  

So, if you play, I’d definitely recommend using the amended starting setup as proposed by the publisher.  With that setup, you’ll have a better first ride through the game, and once you get your feet wet in a fair fight, you can then go back using the ones printed in the rules.  It’s a neat system crafting a cooperative game around real poker hands that will be worth a try.  

As to the obvious question of whether this is different enough from The Gang – I would say that they are very different animals.  For me, The Gang is more about observing how other take chips to rank hands in your mind while Hell of a Deal is much more about making/crafting poker hands.  Which is better?  I think they’re too different to compare like that.  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y (with publisher suggested rules re-write)
• Neutral. Dale Y (with rules as written), John P (with either rules)
• Not for me…