Rattlesnake
- Board's Eye View
- 20 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Michael Hardacre's Rattlesnake is a rootin'-tootin' Western-themed duelling card game. Art is by Roland MacDonald, and the game is published by Osprey Games. The winner is the first player to eliminate their opponent's supply of four hit cards
Players have identical starting decks of cards from which they ordinarily draw a hand of five cards. The cards have values 1-5. Used for attack or defence, it's the numbers that count insofar as they make combos. The attacking player decides how many cards to put into their attack and plays those cards face down. The defender decides how many cards to play in response. When revealed the winner of thev shootout will be the player who played the combo that uses the most cards; so a run of three cards (eg: 2, 3, 4) would beat a pair of any value. Where the combos use the same number of cards, sets beat runs but the comparative value of the cards is only considered where there is otherwise a tie. So, for example, if both players played a three-card run then '2, 3, 4' would beat '1, 2, 3'. If it's still a tie, then the defender wins. If the attacker wins, the defender has to discard one of their hit cards but the attacker doesn't ordinarily discard a hit card when the defender wins. All cards played go to players' own discard piles from where they will be recycled when the player's draw deck has been exhausted.
There's more, of course. All of the cards can alternatively be played for the action printed on the card. When you play a card for its action, it goes to a central discard pile, so it's permanently lost for the remainder of the game. However, cards can be played in this way at any point in the game; so, for example, a player might play a card to alter number on one of the cards in their shootout and so affect the result...
Also, as an alternative to attacking, you can use your turn to 'buy' a card from the five-card 'saloon' display. These can be bought by discarding any two cards from your hand. When a card is bought it goes immediately into your hand and it's replaced by the next card in the saloon draw deck. However, that deck also has five event cards shuffled in. These alter the rules for both players for the remainder of the game, and as each event card comes up it takes up a space in the five-card saloon and so reduces the number of buyable cards on offer...
Rattlesnake is a clever hand management game with a deck building element. There's plenty of scope for bluffing and trying to second guess your opponent. Because hit cards go into players' discard piles you end up drawing them into your hand. You can use them from there to pay towards buying a card from the saloon display and you might, for example, use them as one of the cards you place face down as part of your attack; they won't have any actual effect when the cards are revealed but they might trick your opponent into overplaying or underplaying their hand.
Most of our Rattlesnake shootouts have run to a brisk filler-length 15 minutes, making this one of our 'go to' duellers. A recent re-viewing of the finale of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly tho' left members of the team at Board's Eye View wondering whether it might be possible to set up a three-way shoot 'em up (or four)... One to try perhaps if you have two copies of this card game to hand...
