Designed by: Chris Zinsli,Suzanne Zinsli
Cobras is a trick-taking game with a twist. Your goal is to sell cobras – for points – and you can only sell by winning a trick. But you can only catch cobras in the first place when you lose…
Each player gets a scoring card and a basket card – where they’ll store their cobras. A deck of cards (four suits, numbered 1-13) are dealt out equally between the players. You’ll see that each card has between one and three cobras on it, and before the round starts everyone plays a single card face-down from their hand. These are simultaneously revealed, and everyone puts the amount of cobra tokens on the card into their basket before discarding the card. Then play begins.
Standard trick-taking rules apply – once a player has led a certain suit, you must follow suit if you can. Moving clockwise, everyone plays a card from their hand and the highest card wins the trick. The winner can – in fact, they must – cash in their cobras and get the points value in return, as shown on their basket card. How many points depends on how many cobras – the sweet spot is seven (21 points!) but after that, the retail value drops off steeply – anything more than nine cobras only gets you three points. The losers add up all the cobras on the cards played (including the winners’) and divide that amount of cobras between them, with any leftovers staying in the ‘snake pit’ ready for the next round.
One extra twist though is the King Cobra cards. All players begin a round with one, and they can be played at any time (ignore the follow-suit rule if playing a King Cobra). When played, you can choose to share the win – and cash in your snakes – or share the loss, and gather snakes instead.
Play is kept track of by the amount of cards played with three cobras on them. When the tenth three-cobra card has been played, the round ends. Anyone with cobras in their basket loses a point per cobra! If any player has hit a points target (50, 75 or 100, depending on the number of players) the game will end.
I love trick-taking card games, and the spin on this one feels quite fresh and interesting. There's a nice ebb and flow to the play of a round; building up cobras then timing your win to maximise points is fun (and sometimes excruciating). I've only played this once so far, and more plays might reveal that players don't have quite enough control, but managing your luck is a crucial part of many card games and a big part of the fun. I noticed there's a four player partnership variant in the rulebook - very keen to give that a go.
Plenty. No spaceships to blow up, or cars to overtake, but for a trick-taking game there's a lot of interaction here. You can make a sub-optimal move - deliberately win a trick you don't really want, say - just to blow up someone else's plan. You want to make sure anyone with 6/7/8 cobras doesn't get to cash them in!
Low. There are decisions to be made here and there's definitely a reactive element to the game. But ultimately you're only choosing from a few cards and - unless you play your King Cobra - you have to follow suit.
See above. A first play might have the odd 'eh?' moment as the necessity of losing tricks rather than winning them becomes clear, but after that it's all about managing your cards.
The cards come out randomly, and you can adopt different tactics too.
1-5
Players
10+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
I love a trick-taking game and this is up there with Voodoo Prince and Sticheln as a favourite. Inspired by the Cobra Effect, it's a game where timing is everything - you need to lose tricks to gather the precious cobras, but you need to win in order to cash them in. And sometimes you want to win just to force someone to take cobras when they don't want them!