Designed by: Reiner Knizia
In Kartel, players are corrupt (or corruptible) police detectives, hoping to score points by either getting the gangsters behind bars, or keeping them out of jail in order to receive bribes. Ideally both.
Set-up is very simple – the games’ multitude of coloured tiles (each colour representing rival gangs) are laid out on the table in a large circular path, and the detective piece placed somewhere randomly on the path. The prison board goes in the middle, and play begins.
On your turn you simply roll a die (numbered 2-4) and move up to that many spaces along the path, taking whatever tile you land on. If you gather cartel tiles (faces) then your goal is to make sure the leader of that cartel ends up in jail: if they do every face will be worth a point. Conversely, if you pick up bribes, then you want that leader to stay out of prison, because then they’ll be paid – and turn into points.
How do the leaders end up in (or avoid!) prison? They are on the path as well, and that’s where the catch with Kartel snags you – other players can see you are collecting gang members and deliberately move the detective past the matching leader; keeping him out of jail! And by the same token, if you’re collecting bribes they might just pack him off to chokey, from where he can’t pay you.
There are seven cartels but only spaces for five leaders in prison – once the fifth leader is captured the game ends instantly. Bribes only score if the cartel leader is still at large – if not, they’re worth nothing. Cartel tiles are only worth points if the leader is in jail – if he’s not, they are minus points!
The player with most points wins, and is allowed to make one hackneyed joke about Martin Scorsese.
It's there - most definitely there. Although there is no theft or fighting, the game is very much about denial.
Depends who you're playing with, but it should be very low.
How far to move the detective? The dice dictate the immediate parameters, but the other factors to consider are what you're collecting, and what everyone else is collecting, and what the next player might get up to as well...
Set-up is random and so is dice-chucking. For a more tactical version of the game, you could try removing the die and substituting another movement rule - the detective can always go up to three spaces, for instance.
2-6
Players
6+
Years
5-15
Mins
Sam says
Reiner Knizia is something of the grand old man of game design, and he always favours simple rules making for interesting decisions over complex, convoluted instructions. Kartel is certainly the former, and it ticks the box of a lighter family game. However I do think he's designed far more interesting fare - as I write I can think of High Society, Modern Art and even the super-simple Wildlife Safari that engage me more than Kartel. There's nothing wrong with it: the Knizian hallmark of simple rules>tough decisions is present and correct, but it just doesn't feel as re-playable as many of his other games, so to recommend it would feel incongruous to me.