Guillotine (game)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about the card game. For alternative meanings, see: Guillotine (disambiguation).
Guillotine is a card game created by Wizards of the Coast and designed by Paul Peterson. The game is set during the French Revolution, and was released on Bastille Day in 1998. The goal is to collect the heads of Nobles, accumulating points. Despite the grim topic of the game, the artwork is comical and the tone light.
Contents |
[edit] Yo MOMMA
Game play, for two to five players, takes approximately 30 minutes. Game equipment consists of two decks of cards, "Nobles" and "Actions", and a small cardboard structure representing the guillotine itself. This is mostly symbolic, though it can serve as a convenient indicator of the direction of the line. The Nobles cards carry points values and are collected by players while Action cards allow the player to perform various acts including rearranging the order of Nobles approaching the guillotine, steal heads or Action cards from other players, enhance the point values of certain categories of Nobles (see "Noble Types" below) and so forth.
[edit] Gameplay
The game is divided into three rounds or "days". Each day, twelve noble cards are dealt face-up in a row to be executed. A player's turn consists of:
- Playing an Action card. This is optional.
- Collecting the Noble card at the front of the line.
- Drawing an Action card from the deck.
[edit] Noble types
The Nobles come in five categories, each with its own color border:
- Church (blue)
- Military (red)
- Royal (purple)
- Negative (grey)
- Civic (green)
Grey nobles, typically martyrs that have public sympathy, are worth negative points so the player's goal is to avoid collecting them if possible. The other Nobles have values ranging from 1 to 5 points. Palace guards, in the red category, have a special value in that each guard is worth the total number of guards collected. Thus one guard is worth one point, two guards are worth four points, three guards are worth nine points and so forth.
A typical turn example is a player using an Action card to move a Noble two places forward in the line, i.e advance a high-point Noble from third position to first, collecting that Noble, then drawing another Action card to end the turn. Other Action cards allow the player to move a Noble one or more places backward, useful for moving a low- or negative-value card off the front of the line to collect a higher-value second-position Noble.
Certain Noble cards affect the game, including a card symbolizing Maximilien Robespierre (guillotined in 1794) that causes the "day" to instantly end upon his decapitation. The "Fast Noble" allows (indeed requires) the player who collects it to also take the next Noble in line.
After three "days" of gameplay, the player with the highest point total wins.
[edit] Strategy
The key to winning the game is to manage which Nobles one collects through careful use of action cards while forcing other players to collect low- or negative-scoring Nobles. Some Action cards allow a player to prolong the "day" (by adding new Nobles to the line) or shorten it by allowing Nobles to "escape".
[edit] Availability
After several years of Guillotine being out of print, Wizards re-released the game in 2005 alongside The Great Dalmuti, another previously out-of-print Wizards card game.
[edit] External links
- Guillotine at BoardGameGeek
- Guillotine review at www.thedicetower.com
