Designed by: Reiner Knizia
The theme is Hot Lead is the players are detectives, looking for leads in a case (ie lead rhymes with feed, not fed!) but really, once you begin to play the theme is largely irrelevant. What isn’t irrelevant is the decisions you make…
The goal is to have the most points, and players a dealt a hand of bidding investigator cards from a deck numbered 1-55. Bear in mind that high bids are not necessarily better in this game!
Each round a bunch of criminal cards are dealt face-up on the table in a row. For purposes of scoring, all that matters is they are different colours, and different points values. If a special card is dealt (bad ones are minus points!) is dealt, another is placed on top of it. Then everyone chooses an investigator card from their hand and all ‘investigators’ are simultaneously revealed as a kind of bidding round. The highest bid takes the left-most criminal card, and then each next-highest bid takes the next card/s and so on, so the lowest bidder will take the right-most card/s. Mechanically-speaking, that’s the game: a new round begins and this continues until everyone only has one investigator card, at which point the game ends and most-points wins.
But! There are some things to bear in mind. The first is that the first player to get three criminal cards in each suit will score 1o bonus points. If, however, anyone takes a fourth card of a suit, all cards in that suit become worthless! And finally having all colours at the end of the game in your criminal stack also gets you ten bonus points.
You can't be targeted directly, but there's certainly a tangible sense of plans going wrong and being at the mercy of fate!
Almost entirely absent.
Low - decisions matter, but there's a fair bit of luck. Canny play is certainly possible, looking around the table and seeing what people want - or don't want. But you need the cards in hand to facilitate these ideas, of course, and cards are always running out...
Hot Lead sensibly keeps the playtime relatively brief in recognition of it's luck/strategy balance, but it's generally boisterous good fun
2-5
Players
6+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
Designer Reiner Knizia knows how to load a minimal-rules game with maximum tension, and he does it again here. I'm not sure it's as fun (for me) as the game it reminds me of - 6Nimmt - but on the other hand, it's faster and easier to learn. A good, fast, accessible game for almost any age.