Dia de los Muertos

From: Sacred Chao Games List Price: $8 ($6 street) Players: 3-4 Playing Time: 30-45 minutes  Type of game: Card Skill level: 7 Complexity: 6  Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 26, Summer 2001

I’m a fan of trick-taking games, but most on the market today are simply Whist with variations the authors assure us revolutionize the game. Five suits! Super-trump! Zig-zag cards! Yawn. Former Gaming Dumpster czar Frank Branham brings us Dia de los Muertos, a trick-taking game of another family entirely which actually does offer unique innovations leading to original and interesting gameplay.

The Muertos deck contains four suits— red, green, blue, and black. The RGB suits are identical in distribution, but the black suit is almost entirely different from the others. All the 4s (“muertos cards”) and 2s (“food”) are removed from the deck. A game consists of three hands, one for each day of the titular Mexican festival. In each hand, three 2s and the four muertos cards from a single color (representing the souls of animals, children, or adults) are added to the deck. The goal of this partnership game is to capture these cards. The winning partnership is the one with the most sets of [a food + a muertos] after three hands.

Basic gameplay has the winner of a trick leading to the next, with subsequent players adding a card of their choice subject to one deceptively simple rule: any number of black cards can appear in a trick, but no more than one card from each other suit is allowed. Playing a red 7, for example, prevents all other players from playing red cards in that trick.

This restriction is central to the game. Skillful manipulation of it, and by extension one’s opponents, is the key to victory. All muertos cards in each hand, for example, are the same color. If the first member of the opposition plays a high card, following with a low card of the muertos color prevents the next player from delivering a muertos card into his team’s scoring pile. Card counting would be vital but is instead unnecessary, since non-scoring cards from each trick are kept on public display.

All of the low black cards trigger special effects when played. These include morphing into either of the non-muertos colors; banning any food from being played in the trick; and asking a yes/no question about another player’s hand. Perhaps the most important of these abilities is the Swap, allowing partners to exchange a card with each other. Quite apart from the obvious value of giving a high card to your partner or shifting your color distribution so you’re not forced into playing a card you’d rather not play, these exchanges can communicate valuable information. There are many possible swapping conventions: swap your highest card first; only swap 10s (the highest cards) if you have more than one; always swap black cards unless you’re voiding yourself in a color; swap another Swap to indicate you’ve got a muertos card in your hand; and so forth. I haven’t yet played enough to establish such conventions beforehand, but I can easily see doing so with a group of regular players. Even without prior signal arrangement, each swap carries plenty of unspoken information if only one can properly interpret it.

The final major mechanism is the exchange of gifts which occurs whenever a player captures a scoring card in a trick. That player’s right-hand neighbor takes a card at random from the capturer’s hand, then returns a card from his own. This has a profound effect on strategy. There’s a natural tendency, ingrained from other card games, to hold one’s strongest cards until the end. Here that’s a disaster waiting to happen. Capture a scoring card when your hand is strong and one of those good cards will definitely be stolen. Far better to play strong cards early, while your hand contains low cards to protect the good stuff from theft. The wily designer threw a wrench in the works, however, by giving all 3s the extra ability of zapping any opposing 10 in the same trick. Playing a 10 early practically begs the opposition to counter with a 3, but holding them until later increases the chance of their theft. This mouse-beats-elephant factor keeps tension and interest high, while the shifting of cards between hands means you’re never totally sure of who holds what.

Dia de los Muertos is not only a strikingly different trick-taking game, but a surprisingly good one in which a seeming hodge-podge of disparate ideas gel into a cohesive, satisfying often vexing game.