Sluff Off!

Sluff Off! (also published as Zing, Die Sieben Siegel and Wizard Extreme – among others!) is a trick-taking game where the best score you can get is zero.

The game is made of a deck of cards, some trick tokens, and the Sluffer piece. More on that in a moment.

Cards come in five suits, and are dealt (how many depends on the amount of players). They will be played in the standard trick-taking fashion: a player leads with a card, and if you have a matching suit, you must play it. If you don’t you can get rid (or sluff off) a card you don’t need, or play a trump card. The trump suit in Sluff Off is always blue.

But before you start playing, you’ll be taking tokens equal to how many (and of what colour) tricks you hope to win. Each token is -2 points: when you win a matching trick, you can get rid of it. If you want to take a token and there are none left, you take one from another player instead and that player takes a white -4 token instead. Points-wise that’s obviously worse, but the white tokens are jokers: you can discard them after winning any trick.  Tokens you don’t get rid of count against you in the scoring – and if you win any tricks you don’t have a token for, you have to take a black -3 token! (if you win a trick with a trump, you can either get rid of a blue token or a token of the colour that was led)

Finally you can play the Sluffer: take the Sluffer piece (if nobody else has) and win as few or as many tricks as you like. Your score will be at worst, -4 points. But for every -3 token the other players are forced to pick up your score improves by a point. So playing the Sluffer, your goal is to mess up everyone’s plans…

Play continues for one round per player, then the person with the most – i.e. the least fewest! – points wins.