Where's Bob's Hat?

From: Rio Grande Games Designer: Alan R. Moon List Price: $10 Players: 3-5 Playing Time: 45 minutes  Type of game: Card Skill level: 7 Complexity: 3 Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 27, Summer 2002

The trick-taking card game genre has been pretty thoroughly mined.  Stick a fork in it, it’s done.  Does the world really need another?  Only if it introduces novel mechanisms or fills an underserved niche, I’d argue.  Where’s Bob’s Hat from Alan Moon falls into the latter category (although it’s not really new—it’s a refinement of Moon’s 1990 Wer Hat Mehr?—so we might have cut it some slack anyway).

The deck contains three suits numbered 1-20.  A game consists of 8-12 hands, starting with 5 cards per hand and increasing each time.  After randomly picking a trump suit (or no-trump) for the hand, the dealer decides whether Bob’s titular hat will be naughty or nice.  Whenever a trick contains a 14 or 15, the winner of the trick takes Bob’s hat—possibly stealing it away from its former owner.  Whoever ends up with the hat at the end of the hand gains or loses 10 points depending on whether or not the hat is getting any presents from Santa this year.  This makes early 14s and 15s very interesting in the first few hands, and late ones more important as hand sizes increase. 

With the trump suit and hat disposition in mind, players make their bids in turn.  There are four possible bids-- red, blue, black, or least—any of which may be combined.  A player bidding a color succeeds if he captures more cards of that color than any other player, while a least bid succeeds if he captures fewer cards overall than any other player.  Note that “no bid” is not an option—players must try for something.

A winning color bid earns 5 points plus a point per captured card of that color, but a losing bid incurs a flat 5 point penalty.  Least bids score or deduct points equal to that hand’s size.  Hand scores therefore increase over the course of the game.  This, combined with Bob’s hat, gives trailing players the chance to catch up.  The high reward:risk ratio of color bids also encourages players to go out on a limb and compete with each other, rather than playing it safe.  Meanwhile ties count as failures, which is particularly evil when multiple players bid least and take no tricks.  Don’t let this happen at home— friends don’t let friends compete for a least bid.  These factors combine subtly and elegantly to encourage the behaviors most desirable for an interesting game—no more than one player seeking the fewest cards, and multiple players competing for the colors.

Cardplay is standard trick-taking routine—winner leads the next trick, players must follow suit if possible, high card in led suit wins unless trumped.  The deck is never fully dealt, so some cards are always missing to confound counters.  Every play may therefore be a gamble, amping up the tension yet again.  Every trick becomes important, as sloughed cards add up and suddenly a player who took no red tricks manages to win his red bid while stopping an opponent from making his.

The niche this game fills is for trick-taking card games for three players.  It plays fine with four (we haven’t tried with 5), but four-player trick-taking games are like diners in New Jersey: they blanket the landscape already, one is very much like another, and do we really need more?  But three-player games are rarely dished up, and Schnappchen Jagd has been feeling rather lonely.  Where’s Bob’s Hat is a worthy companion.  It’s evolutionary rather than revolutionary, a small game with a small price.  As in the game itself, your risk is lower than your reward.

Design Peeve: There’s really only one requirement in the graphic design of a deck of cards— the most important information for each card should be clearly visible when a player fans his hand.  But time and time again, graphic designers get it wrong.  Where’s Bob’s Hat? isn’t the most egregious offender, merely the latest. 

Gaffes in Where’s Bob’s Hat? include: unclear font for the numbers; numbers in only one corner (sorry lefties); no corner suit symbols; and no corner “Bob’s hat” symbol for the 14s and 15s (they’re elsewhere on the card instead).   A