All hail the shuffle

I have heard so many great things about 👑 Regicide, so finally it was time to give it a try. Consequently, this is a game we also bought and brought home with us from LeiriaCon. 😁 You could actually try Regicide now with a standard deck of playing cards ❗ , though I did feel like it would be much more fun using the official themed deck.

This is a quick co-operative game of hand management for 1-4 players. Your goal is simple in principle: you need to defeat the 4 jacks, 4 queens and 4 kings (in this order) to win 🏆 - but let me assure you, in practice this is very hard to accomplish! Whenever any player runs out of cards in their hand you all lose. ☠️ Luckily, retrying the game is just a quick shuffle away. 😉

Each turn the active player can play a card to attack ⚔️ the current enemy, also activating a power depending on the suit of the chosen card. Then if the enemy still has health left, it retaliates, which has to be defended 🛡️ by discarding cards with value equal to or more than the incoming damage. 

The core of the fun is this constant arithmetic mathy puzzle. 🧮 Which cards do you use to attack and which to defend. Saving certain suits for their effect is essential. Also, if you defeat an enemy, you get their card for future use - if you get them to exactly 0 health, the card is added to the top of the deck, otherwise to your discard. A quintessential detail if you want to win! ☝️

The suits are all important - but only activate for the card you use when attacking and scale with the value of the card used:

♠️ Spades give you additional defense
♣️ Clubs deal double damage
♦️ Diamonds let players draw cards
♥️ Hearts “heal” back cards from the discard to the bottom of the deck

Oh and additionally, the boss you are currently fighting is immune to its suit. 😱 So you have to be prepared for anything.

Diamonds are the most important, as if you don’t have enough cards in hand to defend then you all lose. But of course if the deck runs out that’s also bad. So everything is useful, everything is important, and there are lots of decisions to be made. Oh and one last thing: you cannot discuss cards with your teammates either. 🤫

It’s a great little game! ☺️