Clans and Glory
- Board's Eye View
- 60 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Designed by Gabriele Bubola and Leo Colovini, and published by Outset Media and Huch!, Clans and Glory is a seemingly simple card game for 2-4 players. It's played with cards numbered 3-8 (3-7 with three players and 3-6 with just two players) and two more boards than the number of players. The Scottish theme is incidental and essentially irrelevant to the gameplay but it does allow a place for the attractive arwork of Toshihiko Ishibashi and Michael Menzel.
On your turn, you can place a card adjacent to or immediately opposite any card with the same number or colour. Players each have five scoring tokens, and you can choose to place out one of them on the board on which you play a card. You can subsequently play more scoring tokens to the same board and other players can play scoring tokens to the same board.
The game ends when each player has placed out eight cards (seven in a four-player game). At this point you flip the stack of tokens on each board so that the token that was placed first is now on top of the stack, and you allocate that player all the lowest value cards on that board. The next token gets all the next value cards and so on. Your end-game score is the total value of all the cards you win in this way.
This method of scoring makes Clans and Glory a tricksy game of bluff and 'take that'. If another player has a token on a board where there are four value 4 cards, you can scupper their hopes of scoring those 16 points by playing a value 3 card to that board (assuming there is a space for it adjacent to or opposite a card of the same colour) because that will make 3s the lowest value of cards on that board. If you've a scoring token going spare, you might then play one to that board to claim all those value 4 cards. This game tho' involves careful husbanding of tokens as well as hand management because you only ever have five scoring tokens.
The dynamics of Clans and Glory differ with player counts. In a two-player game, tho' you don't know precisely what cards your opponent holds (three cards are taken out at random in set up) you have a pretty good idea based on the cards in your own hand. Increasing the player count adds to the push-your-luck element because you have much less idea of who has what cards and so how the scoring might be affected.
You can play Clans and Glory in a filler-length 20 minutes. Experienced gamers will appreciate the tricksy scoring mechanic while less seasoned players will enjoy the fact that this is a game that can be played almost instantly out of the box with no heavy rules overhead.
