Base price: $20.
4 players. 3-player variant included.
Play time: 15 – 60 minutes.
BGG Link
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Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A preview copy of The Six of VIII was provided by New Mill Industries. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
Back with more new games! Normally I’d be fresh to or from GAMA this year, but I’m not going! Who even knows what cons I’ll have bandwidth for this year, so get excited for my reckless disregard for the convention circuit. Sad times, but also, IDK, I got really sick from cons last year so cooling my jets a bit isn’t the worst thing. Plus, GAMA moved to the other side of the country and it’s not exactly easy to get to Louisville from Seattle. Anyways, I can whine about that another time. In the meantime, let’s check out The Six of VIII, from New Mill Industries!
In The Six of VIII, players play a team-based trick-taking game through the reigns of the various wives of Henry the VIII, described by Cunk on Britain as a man with a chronic wife addiction. Each queen’s power is most prominent during her reign, of course, so cards of her suit are trump for as long as she’s in charge. Just be careful! Henry is notoriously a bit … fickle? So things can change faster than you can say the Anglican Church or whatever. Will you be able to score the most points with your team? Or will you end up divorced from victory?
Contents
Setup
Not much. If you’re playing the advanced version version, you can just shuffle the 0 and K cards into the deck; otherwise set them and the Church of England Card aside. If you’re playing with three players, you can also use the three-player card to indicate who is on a team with the dummy player.
Either way, set the Timeline cards in the center in this order:
Place the little crown on the leftmost black space.
Shuffle the deck and deal each player 15 cards:
You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
This one follows a pretty simple trick-taking game format with one twist: the queen is always the trump suit for as long as her reign! Each hand, the timeline advances, and the trump suit changes.
To start a round, each team passes two cards to their partners without looking at the cards they receive until they’ve chosen cards to pass. Once that happens, it’s pretty much trick-taking as usual. The first player to lead plays a card, and every player must play a card of the same suit if they have one. Once that’s done, the player who has played the highest value of the trump suit wins the trick. If no trump suit cards were played, the player who played the highest value of the led suit wins the trick. Tricks will be worth points, so keep those for later. The winner of the trick leads the next one.
In the Advanced Variant, there are a few special cards, like Spies (0 of one suit and 13 of another), the King (super-trump; always wins), and the Church of England (given to the team with fewer points; allows them to cancel a played trick and “annul” the results). They’re fun.
Play continues until the fifteenth trick has been completed. At that time, teams count up their won tricks and gain one point for each diamond on cards in tricks they’ve taken. Note that diamonds are doubled on cards, so either count the diamonds on the left or right side of your cards, not both. The team with more points wins!
For a longer game, play four rounds so that each player gets to lead the first trick once. In those games, the Church of England card is given to the team with fewer points once you hit the red trump suit in the second round.
Player Count Differences
This really is just a four-player game, though the three-player variant does change things up a bit, Plays about the same, but instead, one player has a “dummy” partner who plays with their hand face-up the entire round. After the round is played, only the player with the dummy partner records their score. Play two more rounds so everyone gets to play with the dummy partner, and the player with the highest score wins. It’s kinda nifty.
Strategy
- Keep in mind that your cards are going to shift in strength as the trump suit changes; you may want to save some cards for later. Just because you have a lot of cards that are relatively high value doesn’t necessarily mean you want to play them all at once. You can also save lower-value cards for rounds where they’ll be trump cards so that you can make them more useful. Either way works.
- Similarly, you may want to play cards now to force your opponents to follow with cards that will be stronger later. This is a very viable strategy. For instance, playing green during the red round and forcing everyone to follow green might be a great way to not only win a trick but also make up for having fewer trumps of a certain color.
- Try to figure out what your teammate has (or more importantly, what they don’t have) so that you can potentially throw tricks for them to trump and win. This is a pretty useful back-and-forth, to be honest; you can just figure out where your teammate’s gaps are and where yours are and lead tricks so that they can play trump if you lose it to your opponents or vice-versa. That kind of good coverage is critical in team-based trick-taking games.
- Don’t trump your teammate! It’s rude if they’re already winning the trick (unless you’re worried about the next player beating you both). There’s not really much of a need to, again, unless you’re worried about the next player. You’re just wasting a card you could have used to win a trick later.
- Try to remember what cards you’ve already seen, so you know what’s still out there. It’s not the easiest thing in the world, but I usually try to remember if I’ve seen all the cards that are higher than my highest card of a given color so I know if I can safely lead it or not.
- Passing cards to your partner is always important. You can use that to get rid of cards of one suit and get cards of another so that you and your partner can alternate having strong hands of different trump colors. Naturally, you can’t communicate your intent, but that’s definitely the ideal outcome.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- I really like the shifting “quality” of your hand as tricks go on; it’s a very cool effect and can turn good hands into bad hands into good hands again. It also means that your strategy needs to shift along with it, making the game a lot more tactical than strategic at times. It’s a fun spin on trick-taking without asking too much from players, which I think strikes a very nice balance.
- Thematically, the game is very fun; I particularly like the Church of England card allowing you to “annul” a trick. I particularly like that the suits and the timelines are variable length to represent the various queens’ reigns. I think that’s the kind of clever design work that makes a game memorable.
- Plays pretty quickly. The short game, at least; it’s only one complete hand.
- The game is also pretty easy to learn, which is nice. It’s pretty standard trick-taking; the hook is that your hand is pretty constantly shifting. It’s a good hook, as I mentioned.
- Nice portability factor. These games have a nice compact little size to them, though I hope the final version has playtime and player count on the box.
- I appreciate that the publisher sent me a little bag that can only fit the tiny crown that goes on the Timeline Track. From an environmental standpoint it’s probably Not Great, but I do love it.
- I had forgotten how much fun team-based trick-taking games are. Being able to pass cards and trying to manage complex strategies with another person is great, and I don’t feel like I’m letting my teammate down as much as I do when I mess up in other team-based games.
Mehs
- A team game with a dummy player feels less fun than having a partner who can potentially make wildly inadvisable decisions. I mostly get vexed by games with variants like this, though it does make me wonder if you could use the same logic to make this playable with two players.
Cons
- I understand the graphic design choice around the diamonds, but having two sets of diamonds where there’s one set of the actual number on each side is a bit confusing and distracting. I wish that they had been in the middle instead. I understand that if you’re holding the cards from the side it’s easier to view, but boy howdy does it make the game more complicated for some players’ first play since they see the diamonds and immediately forget that you mentioned the diamonds are doubled.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I think The Six of VIII is pretty great! It’s an excellent step up from your more common trick-taking games, and the simple hook is a really elegant way to elevate a game and make it entertaining and compelling. Add in a nice thematic hook and you’ve really got a nice blend of theme and gameplay, which isn’t always common in the trick-taking space. There’s even a tiny crown! This may be my go-to game for teaching team-based trick-taking in the future. It’s super easy to pick up and play, people are going to enjoy the theme, and the basic game plays very quickly, too! I particularly like the Church of England card; I haven’t seen a “cancel played trick” card since Skull King, and it was phenomenal there, too. Just a really devastating card if played correctly, or an incredible nuclear deterrent until it was played. Very fun. I don’t love the duplicated diamonds on the cards, but that caused a decent amount of confusion when we played with newer players. When I played, I usually splay my cards right anyways, so I only saw one set. I’m also not entirely sold on the three-player variant, but that’s okay! I prefer it at four players anyways. If you’re looking for a new go-to trick taking game that’s streamlined and simple, or you want a game you can play with Six (the musical) blaring in the background, I’d definitely recommend The Six of VIII! It’s a great little game.
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