La Cuenta
- Board's Eye View
- Oct 15
- 3 min read
You've gone out for a meal with your friends. You're all ordering tapas and wine, and you're running up a bill but who is going to pay...? That's the premise for this fun 3-8 player card game from 2Tomatoes, designed by Litus Carreras, with cartoon art supplied by Ariadna Altimira.
The game is played with a deck of 100 cards comprising vegetable, meat and fish tapas dishes, wine and a bunch of special cards. Players each start off with a notional €900-€1400 in their wallet, depending on player count, and everyone is dealt a hand of five cards. On your turn you play one of your cards to a shared tableau. Tapas cards can be added provided that the price on the card is equal to or greater than the corresponding tapas item that's already been ordered. You can keep ordering bottles of wine. Special cards have various effects, including reversing turn order, locking a tapas type so that no more of that type can be ordered, and doubling the price of an item. If someone orders coffee (ie: plays a coffee card), no more tapas, wine and certain other special cards can be played... If you can't play a card, you must ask for the bill, and the total value of everything ordered has to be totted up and knocked off the amount in your wallet. There are, however, some special cards that can vary the bill: a 50/50 card lets you nominate another player with whom you'll split the bill, and a 'go dutch' card divides the bill up among all the players.
If this sounds a little dry, we found we got a similar response when teaching this card game to new players. Once games were up and running, however, players invariably found La Cuenta a lot of fun. Players don't replenish the cards in their hand during a round, so there's a tension as you can see in advance how likely it is that you will have a valid card play. And there's much raucous laughter when a player scuppers your intended card play by ordering coffee... If you think you're likely to get stuck with the bill, it can even be a viable strategy to ask for the bill early (ie: even if you have a viable card still in hand), on the basis that the bill will be lower than it might otherwise be. Mind you, even after a player asks for the bill, other players can play special cards that add tips as a 'take that' action - further inflating the bill! And do you have that friend who always seems to nip out to the toilet just when the bill is due? There's a special card that even replicates this! When you have to pay the bill you get to discard any cards you don't want and you add a card to the size of hand you draw on the next round - so the game incorporates a catch-up mechanic.
We've so far only played La Cuenta sober as a 15-minute filler-length game but we reckon it would make an amusing game to play after a few drinks - maybe even at a tapas bar! There's just one problem, there's a lot of maths! Not only do you have to add up the total cost of all the items ordered, you have to deduct that total from your notional starting funds. It gives La Cuenta an educational element for children practising their arithmetic but don't be surprised if some adults find it a chore - probably the same adults who never bother to check their actual bills when eating out. It seems odd that the game includes tokens to indicate increases in hand size but there's nothing to represent money. We could manage perfectly well without the hand-size tokens but we would've welcomed money - even Monopoly-style paper money - for our in-game wallets. We expect to continue to play this game many times, but for future plays we'll probably repurpose some money added in from other games.
