Game Preview: La Soupe à Gertrude

By W. Eric Martin
September 25, 2008

Publisher: Cocktail Games
Designer: Jean Marc Courtil
Players: 2-4
Ages: 6+
Playing Time: 10-20 minutes
Release Date: End of October (but available at Spiel 08)
Rules Language: French (English rules available at Spiel 08)
Price: €10

Jean Marc Courtil is debuting as a game designer in 2008 with two titles: Bobby Sitter from Asyncron Games, and this one, a new entry in Cocktail Games’ Jeu de Poche (Pocket Game) series. La Soupe à Gertrude is a bidding game in which players want to collect vegetables for their soup; be the first to hold three different types of veggies and you win.

The deck consists of three types of cards: money (which varies from 1 coin to 5), actions, and veggies (in four types with two cards of each type). Each player starts with four coin cards in hand. On a turn, one player looks at three cards from the deck, then places one card face-up and the other two face-down while announcing an opening bid. All players then bid on the lot simultaneously, including the player who looked at the cards; the highest bid wins the lot, and that player then distributes coin cards as evenly as possible to the other players until he’s paid out his bid. Note that the buyer must distribute the cards as evenly as possible, not the coins, so if you win a lot with a bid of 12, you can give two “5 coin” cards to one player and one “1 coin” card to the other two players. That might not be a smart play, but you can still do it…

“Some action cards will bring chaos by letting you do things like steal vegetables from other players,” says Courtil. Specifically, the mouse card lets you demand a type of vegetable from another player, giving him some trifling card in exchange, and the Gertrude card lets you grab three random cards from another player and keep one of them. The opponent can discard a Gertrude card, which itself is worth five coins, to prevent either of these attacks.

Play continues until someone has the trio of veggies needed for their soup, or until the deck runs out, in which case the player with the most valuable collection of vegetables wins. Rules and cards for a variant are included, with a turnip that spoils someone else’s soup and a fly that keeps you from winning as long as you hold it.

Game review, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Preproduction copy
Times played: Seven, five times with two players and twice with four

With three and four players, Gertrude’s Soup uses a closed economy system similar to Reiner Knizia’s Traumfabrik, but players might not start with equal funds since the money cards are dealt out randomly. That’s each player’s first worry, and while the game equalizes money to some degree as player’s win auctions and pass around coins (and other cards worth money), the game doesn’t last long enough to really balance the scales. Of course, the short playtime works in both directions, encouraging players not to worry too much about balance as the game is more of a lark than a finely honed mind-crusher.

With two players, the auction system changes so that the winning bidder pays the other player only the single most valuable card used to pay for the bid, with the other cards being removed from the game. This payoff system creates interesting dilemmas for both players as you essentially learn what each player holds after a couple of turns thanks to the requirement to reveal any cards won in auctions. Thus, if I know an opponent holds high-valued money cards, I can force him to push the bid up dramatically by placing the bid that he wants to. If he holds only 4s and 5s, for example, I can bid 5 to push him up to 8 and possibly make him spend more than he wants – or win the cards for myself, which might not be a bad option either.

The two player system also allows you to remove certain vegetables from the game depending on how the bids turn out. If I pay a 5 bid with a “3 coin” card and a tomato (worth 2 coins), that tomato is removed from the game. (Ideally I’ll be holding the other tomato card when I make such a move!)

So far I’ve preferred the game with two players rather than four. Whether this was coincidental or a result of first-timers in a new game, in both four-player games, the player who won had purchased his own lot of cards on that final turn. In other words, knowing what that lot held allowed that player to bid everything on winning those cards and ending the game. The other players were stuck in the position of having to counter that aggressive bid by offering nearly everything they held and hoping they weren’t taking home the goat behind door #3 instead of valuable veggies. Perhaps with additional plays this concern would vanish as you become adept at tracking who holds which cards, but if you can set yourself up with a single veggie and a wad of cash, you might do well to sit quietly until your turn rolls around, hope for the double veggie or veggie/mouse draw, and bet the farm to win.

With two players, we seemed to avoid that “alpha strike” approach to winning and instead had more time to worry about the ebb and flow of our purse, trying to figure out when the other player was bluffing and what an average lot should cost. The luck factor in the draw is still present, but the direct back-and-forth seemed to provide more opportunities for countering the opponent.

In the end, though, no matter what the player count, Gertrude’s Soup will frequently end before you have time to implement whatever strategy you have in mind. You’re either saving for an endgame that never comes or holding on to a few dear coins and trying to rebuild your stash before – oh, wait, the game’s over. Given that knowledge, you have to be comfortable just freestyling your approach to the game and seeing what happens.

Full disclosure: Cocktail Games hired me to edit the English rules for Gertrude’s Soup.

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