Whoa There Cowboy!
- Board's Eye View
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
From the title you would be forgiven for thinking this was a Western-themed card game. It isn't. Not really. The cards feature anthropomorphised animals in Stetsons and a neckerchief but this is essentially a reworking of the card game Cheat. The title is what players are supposed to call out when challenging the cards played by an opponent.
Whoa There Cowboy! is designed by Apryl Stott, Harrison Beck amd Jessica Beck, and it's published by Grandpa Beck's Games. It notionally takes 2-6 players but you could readily push that to more. It's played with a deck of cards numbered 1-7, and the rules closely follow those for Cheat, which is usually played with standard playing cards. You're trying to shed cards from your hand and you do so by 'ladder climbing': playing more cards of the number just played or playing cards with a higher number. As in Cheat, cards are played face down and they may or may not be of the values claimed for them. When the number being played reaches 7, subsequent plays go down rather than up.
Where Whoa There Cowboy! primarily differs from Cheat is in the scoring. Players start off with a hand of just seven cards. Empty your hand and you win a 20-point token but you refresh your hand back up to seven cards. Successfully call 'Whoa There Cowboy!' on a cheat and you win a 10-point token; the cheat gets penalised by having to pick up their cards and another card from the deck. Make a wrongful accusation and the player who was wrongfully accused gets to give one of their cards to their accuser. Players collect points tokens over two or three cycles of the deck, depending on the number of players.
Whoa There Cowboy! plays in around 20 minutes with up to four players; 30 minutes with five or six players. You can expect turns to be brisk, with much hilarity and enjoyment generated by players' bluffing and double-bluff interactions. The scoring system enhances the core Cheat mechanic so that most players feel like they're in with a chance of snatching victory; an improvement on the ordinary playing card version of the game.
Grandpa Beck's Games incorporate some variant rules that you can try when playing Whoa There Cowboy! as a family game. These include ideas for upping the rewards for children and handicapping adults.
