Toil & Troublez
- Board's Eye View
- Jun 16
- 2 min read
Toil & Troublez is a push-your-luck card game designed by Petr Vojtech. It takes 2-6 players, plays in around 20-30 minutes and is published by Grandpa Beck's Games.
The game is played using a deck of cards with values 1-5 in three different colours plus several special effects cards. On your turn you draw a card and place it out on the end of one of three rows subject to the limitations that number cards must be in ascending order and cards cannot be adjacent to a card of the same colour. If you draw a Cloak card you can place it on top of a card already in a display, cloaking it so that its placement limitation effect can be ignored. Other special effect cards are placed out anywhere, except that you cannot have more than one of each type in a row.
You can keep drawing as many cards as you like. When you stop, you choose any of the rows and take all the cards in that row to your personal stash, but if you push-your-luck too far and draw a card that you cannot legally place then you don't get to take any cards to your stash. It's only when a player picks up a row that any special effects are triggered for the player that takes the row with them in it: Poison forces them to discard one of their number cards, Summons lets them steal a number card from another player's tableau, and Vanish lets the player call out a number and require all the players to discard a card with that number.
Toil & Troublez keeps players involved in each other's turns because at the end of every player's turn all the other players get to take any one card from the end of any of the rows.
All the cards that players collect go into their individual tableaus where they'll be worth 1 point each at the end of the game, but you can trade in any sets you collect either of numbers 1 through to 5 or of four cards of the same number. You discard the cards in the set, so they're no longer at risk of being affected by special effects cards and, crucially, each set is worth 10 points - so at least doubling the value of the cards you're discarding.
This is a light card game where there'll usually be an initially generous array of possibilities for placement lulling players into a false sense of security about taking just one more card... Tho' the special effects cards introduce a moderate 'take that' element, Toil & Troublez is still a family-friendly push-your-luck and set collection game.
