Poison Bottles card game review

Poison Bottles

Respectful board game community and BoardGameKing subscribers! Let us present the card game that you will prefer for sure – “Poison Bottles” by Dark Flight.

It has a cool design and well-balanced mechanics and also it is highly strategic game for your brains and also you will have a lot of ways to achieve victory. Poison bottles has successfully raised 3,253$ with 178 backers and there are 5 options for backers.

Inside the box

  • Box
  • Sixty Number Cards (1-10 Duplicated for Each Color)
  • Twelve Poison Bottles (6 arts)
  • Four Rat Markers
  • Set of Instructions

Poison Bottles - Unboxing

Gameplay

“Poison bottles” has the elements of traditional card games such as trick taking phase which opens the game process. The goal of the game is to get the lowest score. It means that you will need to protect your combinations from attackers and defeat the opponents’ boards with those combos. That’s it! Now let’s go to the Rules section.

Rules

The game process in Poison bottles can be divided into 5 phases which are – Trick Taking phase, Peeking, Swapping/Attacking and Drawing.

Trick Taking

Each player takes a card and places it in the center of the table. It starts with the leader in a clockwise order. The color of the card determines the color of that trick. The player who has the highest card of the leader’s color wins the trick.

Packing

During the peeking phase each player can secretly look at one card on any player’s board, including their own without changing its position. Afterwards, each player puts their marker on any one of their cards to stop it from being swapped during the attack phase.

Swapping (Losers of Trick-Taking Only)

Each of the losers in the trick taking round swaps one card from their own board with one from their hand. They may not simply put the same card back; they must switch it with a new one from their hand. The players are allowed to see the card before deciding which card to replace it with.

Attacking (Winner of Trick Taking Only)

The winner of the trick-taking phase swaps a card without a marker on it from an opponent’s board with one from their own hand. This is done once to each opponent in any order. The winner must take a card from an opponent’s board and replace it with one from the winner’s hand before doing the same to the next opponent. The winner is allowed to look at the card before deciding which card to replace it with, but they must replace it with one from their hand.

Drawing

Each player draws a single card to bring their hand back up to five cards and then the next turn begins with the trick-taking phase. The game ends immediately when there are not enough cards for each player to draw one card during the drawing phase. Four Player Game: In the four player game, all rules are kept the same except that the trick discard pile is recycled once.

Poison Bottles - Art

End Game Scoring

At the end of the game, each player performs one swap action. After every player has finished their swap, each player reveals their board (keeping all cards in their same positions). Each card is worth points equal to its number, and poison bottles are worth 11 points, but if any player manages to make a row or column of three cards of the same number (not counting diagonals), then those three cards are removed from the player’s board and count as zero points. An exception to this rule is three poison bottles in a row; if a player manages to get three poison bottles in a row then the poison bottles are eliminated and the player is rewarded with -30 points.

Poison Bottles - Cards

Final Thoughts

“Poison Bottles” by Dark Flight seems to be one of the most strategic and tactical card games we ever played. In this sense, players have to use their logic and tactics to attack the other player’s board. Moreover, you will have to remember the opponent’s cards to perform the best playing. That game is surely 10/10! You can purchase it here. See you next time! Feel free to subscribe and comment our content!

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