Potato Man
Designed by: Günter Burkhardt,Wolfgang Lehmann
He might sound like a rather ineffective super hero, and he kind of is…
Potato Man is a trick-taking game with a difference. The deck is made up of four sets of cards (red, yellow, blue, green) but their scoring values are different – yellow for instance only goes up to ten, whereas red goes as high as eighteen, with blue and green somewhere in-between them.
Players are dealt the whole deck, barring a few cards – which means nobody is 100% sure which cards are missing. Scoring cards – sacks of potatoes – go in the centre of the table. As with the deck itself the scoring cards are of the four colours; plus an extra ‘golden’ scoring card.
The starting player lays down a card, and everyone follows – but they must lay a colour that hasn’t been played yet. The highest number wins (ties are decided in favour of the most-recently-played card) and the winning player takes a score card matching the colour of their winning card from the centre. If the colour they won with has run out, they get to take one of the valuable golden score cards, which have five sacks! (yellow have four, green three, blue two, and red a miserly one sack).
Play continues until somebody can’t lay a card because they don’t have the required colour or colours in their hand, at which point the round finishes. Play is usually one round per player.
Oh, and Super Potato Man. He appears on the lowest scoring yellow cards (1,2 and 3) and the only time he can win a round is if another player has played Evil Potato Man (appearing on the reds 16,17 and 18) who he can defeat. Otherwise he is rubbish.
Sam says
Super Potato has perhaps latched on the theme of heroic vegetables for folks unfamiliar with trick-taking games. The mechanics are pretty clever, but it is basically flipping trick-taking on its head and inverting the standard must-follow-suit rule. As such it’s intriguing and engaging. It’s also quite mechanical, however, and you can feel more at the mercy of circumstance than many trick-taking games. But I like it; it’s interesting.
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Take That!
It's a trick-taking game, so not much.
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Fidget Factor!
Very low, as long as your very own Boris Spassky isn't playing.
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Brain Burn!
Low
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Again Again!
At first glance it might seem counterintuitive, having decks of different values and evil and heroic potatoes in the mix... but it's actually not that crazy. Cards are random, and the game does allow for a bit of strategy.
