Proving Ground
- Board's Eye View
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Proving Ground is a bit of a departure for Dragon Dawn Games. That's not because it's a tricksy trick-taking card game - Dragon Dawn are renowned for those - but because it's notionally themed around squabbling orcs rather than their more usual Soviet dwarves. The game takes 3–5 players and is designed by Ren Multamaki with art by Arvi Tammi.
The game is played using a deck of 54 cards with numbers 0-8 in six suits. The cards tho' each show two different suits and values, depending on which way up the card is. And unlike Scout (Oink Games), you're permitted however you like to organise your hand and the orientation of each individual card. The basic cardplay is straightforward. As you'd expect, the lead card determines the lead suit, but other players don't have to follow suit: you can play any card from the lead suit or you can play a card from either adjacent suit provided the card you play has a higher number than any card previously played in that trick. The adjacent suits are indicated on the lead card. If you can't or choose not to play a card to a trick, you must discard a card face down and take a penalty...
In most trick-taking games, each trick ends when all the players have played a card but in Proving Ground players can continue to play cards to a trick just as long as they meet the criteria of matching the lead suit or being of higher rank than a previously played card. You can pass without penalty provided you've already played at least one card to the trick. The trick ends when there have been two successive passes, and the winner of the trick is the player who played the highest numbered card regardless of suit.
This tho' is where the game gets tricksy. There are hexagonal scoreboards positioned between each player, and, as in Between Two Cities (Stonemaier Games) players will all score the boards to their left and to their right. When you win a trick, you get to place a white peg on one of your adjacent boards in a hole that corresponds to the suit of the winning card. At the end of the round (when any player has no cards left in hand) all the players score for the two scoreboards to their left and right. And while the yellow suits always score 1 point per white peg, the blue and red suits alternate between scoring 2 points or minus 1 point per white peg; so you're going to want to try to manipulate the marker that determines which is positive and which is negative...
There's more. The game is played over three rounds and at the end of the first and second rounds all the white pegs are replaced with orange pegs. These don't contribute in any way to scoring but they block positions on the scoreboards. Whenever a player wins a trick and is unable to place a peg in the appropriate position on either of their adjacent scoreboards then they take penalties: one in round 1, two in round 2 and three in round 3. In our plays at Board's Eye View, non-placement penalties have been relatively rare in round 1 but they become an increasing hazard as more pegs have been placed out. Penalties aren't just worth negative points; you automatically lose (and end the game prematurely) if you collect 7 penalty tokens.
It's not so much the Between Two Cities scoring as the pegs and penalties that make this a really tricksy trick-taker. As the scoreboards get increasingly pegged out so it can actually prove to be a liability to win a trick... The sneaky scoring manipulation makes the game highly interactive; especially so in the three-player game where everyone is sharing a board with everyone else.
Dragon Dawn Games are bringing Proving Ground to Kickstarter later this year. Click here to check out the campaign.
