Dess Bassd!
- Board's Eye View
- 2 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Designed by Mario Sandor, Dess Bassd! is a number-ranking card game from Palatia Spiele that was being shown off at Spiel Essen 2025. The number ranking may put you in mind of The Mind (Pandasaurus) but Dess Bassd! isn't a cooperative psychology experiment; it's a competitive game for 2-6 players - tho' there may be some mind games involved as you try to finesse cards into your own row and avoid them being finagled by an opponent. The object of the game is to be the first player to have a row of seven face-up cards in ascending order. If two players complete their rows on the same turn, the winner is the player with the smallest difference between their highest and lowest cards.
The cards in the game are numbered 1-74 but you only use all the cards in a six-player game; for example, in a three-player game you only use cards 1-38. The highest card is taken out and only used as a reminder of the range in play. The other cards are shuffled, dealing each player a hand of four cards and a row of seven face-down cards. The remaining cards (one more than the number of players) are placed face up as a market display.
At the start of the game, each player takes any card from their seven-card row, replacing it with a card from their hand. Obviously if you have a low-numbered card in your hand you'll want to draw your face-down card from the left of your row; if you have high numbered cards you will pick up a card from the right-hand side. The card you play also functions as it would in a trick-taking card game, in that the player who played the highest card becomes the start player in the next round. That can be crucial because going first in a round gives you much more control...
In a standard turn, you play a card from your hand which will go to the market display at the end of the round. You then take a card from the current market display and place it face up in your seven-card row, adding to your hand the face-down card it replaced. Cards can only be placed face-up in your seven-card row if they are in ascending order (ie: higher than all of the face-up cards to their left and lower than those to their right) so as the game progresses it's likely that a player may have no legal placement in their row for any of the face-up cards in the market display. When this occurs, the player just swaps a face-up card from the display with a face-up card in their seven-card row. As you might guess, much of the tactics of the game is about leaving opponents with no alternatives other than a mere card swap.
Dess Bassd! makes for a lively filler-length game that generates a surprising amount of 'take that' 'hate drafting'. Palatia Spiele have also included some optional special cards and variant rules to switch things around. And it's worth noting that both the publisher and game designer have waived their fees for the game so that all profits from sales go to support the Vorderpfalz Spielt! charitable project.
