Designed by: Reiner Knizia
Friday the 13th (previously called Poison and Baker’s Dozen) is a card game with simple rules that is impossible to master – just when you think you’re out, you get poisoned.
The deck is made up of three potions (red, blue, purple) of varying numbers from 1 to 7, and a fourth colour, green, which is poison. All greens have a value of 4. On the table are three cauldrons where players will be depositing a card on their turn. There’s one cauldron for each colour, and the colours may not be mixed together. Poison cards, however, can be thrown into any cauldron at all.
Play moves around the table with each player adding a card to a cauldron of their choosing. However when the cumulative value in any cauldron goes over 13, the player who caused it has to pick up all the cards in the cauldron and place them in front of them on the table (they leave the card they played in the cauldron).
Play continues until everyone has run out of cards, at which point the scores are totted up. Low scores are good in this game – and every card you picked up counts as 1 point against you, except – crucially – if you have the most of any of the three colours those cards are discounted and score zero.
Poison cards (green ones) count as 2pts against you and having the most of these won’t save you.
Play a fixed set of rounds (usually one per player so everybody gets to start once) and tot up your final scores. It’s a twisty-turny game where one good round can catapult you into the lead – and of course, one bad round have the opposite effect.
If other players spot you are trying to get the most of a particular colour, you can't blame them for poisoning it with green cards.
Not much.
Some simple maths that grown-ups can help children with. Tactically, occasionally you'll be faced with a hard choice. Play safe and take a low hit, or a calculated gamble on something that could backfire?
Cards ensure some randomness, and different hands are best played different ways. It's not a game with huge variety, but we've found it rather more-ish.
3-6
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
An impressively tense game, considering the mechanics consist mainly of basic maths. We went for a considerably long period of playing almost weekly. If it has a drawback it's that the game can feel a little long, but you can negate this with house-rules (i.e. fewer rounds, or points for positioning (none for first place!) as well as points scored on the cards)