Ruleta Rusa
Of all the push-your-luck games in existence there can be none with quite such high stakes as Russian Roulette. Played with a loaded revolver it must surely be the ultimate push-your-luck game. We've retained the Spanish title for this review of GDM's Ruleta Rusa but the title translates to English as Russian Roulette. Happily, however, Raúl López has designed a version of Russian Roulette that doesn't involve any actual firearms and where any loss of life is entirely metaphorical.
The game is played with appropriately weighted poker-chip tokens. There's a stack of eight black revolver chips: seven show 'click' on their reverse but one shows 'Bang!'... Each of the 2–6 players has three white chip tokens, each showing a specific ability on their face-up side. On your turn you either reveal the top chip from the revolver pile or use (flip face down) one of your white chips; 'click' has no effect - just leave the 'click' chip face up and your reward for success is you can flip face up one of your white chips that was previously face-down (ie: one used on a previous turn). If you draw the Bang! chip, however, you lose a life (one of your face-up white chips). Whenever the Bang! is drawn, the eight-chip revolver pile is shuffled and reset.
The standard white chip actions are Flip (turn face down a white chip of another player); Pass (choose another player to take a turn, with play continuing clockwise from them) and Reorder (look at the black chips and reorder them as you choose).
Ruleta Rusa is easy to play. It's playable as a two- or three-player game but we've preferred it with 4–6 players. There's player elimination when a player draws a Bang! but has no face-up chips left, but it's a short 15-minute game and player elimination in this version of Russian Roulette isn't as permanent as in its namesake. Your white chips effectively cost you a life to use them because it's only a face-up chip that you can sacrifice when you draw a Bang! but your hope is that you'll be able to recover a face-down chip on your next turn... As 'click' chips are drawn and the revolver pile thins so players are conscious of the increased odds of a Bang! appearing on the next chip. As a result, Ruleta Rusa delivers palpable tension...
(Review by Selwyn Ward)
