Designed by: Travis Hancock
It’s 1350 in Bristol, and the Black Death ravages the city. In this bleakly comic party game, you the players are scrambling for the safer climes of the countryside as you ride apple carts through the city. The first to pass through the city gates wins – But! Only if they haven’t caught the plague in the meantime…
Everyone starts with a playing piece in one of the three carts, two Symptoms cards and one Remedy card. The piece is you, the cart is the cart, the symptoms represent your current health score (lower is better), from navigable headaches (1) to the more problematic buboes (4) and the Remedy a potential saving grace for you, somewhere on your journey. It works like this: in each round, six dice are rolled, the colours of the die faces matching the colours of the cart. Once everyone has taken a turn, each cart will move one space along the track for each die face matching its colour.
Before that however the players all jostle for position as they strive to be at the front of the first cart out of the city. On your turn you take a single action: you can elbow your way to the front of the cart you’re in, dash to the back of a cart ahead of you, or push someone (possibly yourself) off a cart, who’ll then hop on the furthest-back available position of all three carts. There are two more actions: pick up another Remedy card, or re-roll two of the dice. Re-rolling dice is not just about trying to push your own cart the fastest – it’s also about avoiding the dreaded mingle.
Once everyone’s had their turn, before the carts move, if the any die faces have two or more rats of a matching colour, all occupants in the card have to shuffle their symptom cards together along with an extra one from the deck. Then two symptom cards are dealt back to everyone, and the extra card discarded face-down. At some point, you may find your health score has hit (or gone beyond) 6, which means you have the plague. You now cannot win the game (even if your health score goes down again) and your new goal is to try and ensure nobody else does either, by infecting them all as well, causing as many mingles as you can!
Then the carts move, and a new round begins. Lest we forget, your Remedy cards are free action on any turn: simply play them to activate the power on the card – the Pomander, for example, allows you to draw two symptom cards and then discard two from your hand (a helpful way to keep your health score low, or raise it if you’re already plagued!) the chicken lets you re-roll up to three times, arsenic locks two dice (they can’t be rerolled) and so on.
The madness continues until either one player has reached the city wall in good health, or all carts have left the city with every player considerably unwell – in which case, you all lose! That’s the plague, man.
Heavily combative and bleakly brutal, this is a steeple chase through an intensive care department with zero sanitiser
Very low - everyone gets the single action and even with a higher player count (the game plays up to nine) you won't be waiting too long for your turn
Low at most, and often less than that, with the whimsy of fate often deciding things for you.
Dice and cards provide randomness here and there's always a whiff of deduction about it, but revisiting Bristol 1350 depends on how much you enjoy the slings and arrows (and elbows) of human desperation, kismet and mortality distilled to their blackly comic essence.
3-8
Players
10+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Bristol 1350 is harsh fun. Though it describes itself as a social deduction game, and you might sometimes safely conclude that player X is definitely plagued, because the plagued players have no real need to keep their plagued status hidde (and often the unplagued can't do much about it anyway but hope for the best) it feels both extremely chaotic and at times arbitrary experience: you can be plagued after your first turn and face the rest of the game playing spoiler tactics, or stumble to a fortunate win purely because fate smiled on you. But that said, it's still fun - for players who like their fun to arrive in their face, like a pus-infested custard pie flung from close range. And although nine players will probably take an hour, the ideal (6-7) will be considerably shorter. For 6-7 players who like their race for freedom dirty as an old dishcloth, though.