Game Review: Bonnie & Clyde

By W. Eric Martin
March 16, 2009

Designer: Mike Fitzgerald
Publisher: Rio Grande Games / Abacusspiele
Players: 2-4
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Rules Language: English & German
Price: $25 / €20
Links: (Eng) / (De)

Version played: Production copy
Times played: 16 – twice with 4 players, thrice with 3, and the rest with 2

Whatever else Mike Fitzgerald designs in the future, he’ll likely remain best-known for the Mystery Rummy series of games, all of which take the melding element of rummy in new directions thanks to settings both historic and fictional. The fifth game in the Mystery Rummy series – Bonnie & Clyde – took years to make it into print following U.S. Games’ discontinuation of the series after the releases of Jack the Ripper, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Jekyll & Hyde and Al Capone and the Chicago Underground (co-designed with Nick Sauer). (Wyatt Earp, co-designed with Richard Borg and released by alea and Rio Grande Games, is not part of the Mystery Rummy series, yet the game shares common elements and similar game play. Shannon Appelcline will post an overview of the Mystery Rummy series in his March 19 column.)

Was Bonnie & Clyde worth the wait? How does their crime spree and final reckoning with the law play out in game terms? The results are mixed, thanks to a solid game design that’s paired with graphic design verging on the criminal.

On the Run

Players in Bonnie & Clyde are law officers who want to track down the pair and put them away. Bonnie and Clyde’s final series of confrontations with the law is represented by a gameboard with ten numbered locations, the first with a byline of “Kaufman, Texas 1932” – when Bonnie was captured after a robbery – and the final one being “Gibson, Louisiana, May 23, 1934” – when the couple was shot and killed by law officers in an ambush. The game also includes a wooden car, which moves across the board to suggest the location of the criminals, and a deck of cards with six cards for each numbered location, a card each for Bonnie and Clyde, and 15 Ted Hinton cards, with Hinton being a Deputy Sheriff who was part of the ambush.

The game is played in a series of rounds, and at the start of each round, the Bonnie and Clyde cards are shuffled with eight random cards, then one card is placed below each of the ten locations on the gameboard. Players alternate turns, and on a turn you must draw a card (from the top of the deck or discard pile) and must discard a card. In between you can play one Ted Hinton card, which lets you either draw two cards, take any card from the discard pile, or look at a face-down card beside the board, possibly taking it. You can also play any number of melds and layoffs that you desire, with those cards being played as follows:

• When you play a meld – that is, a set of three or more cards depicting the same location – you look at the card underneath that location on the gameboard. If the card is Bonnie or Clyde, you must leave it if the car isn’t in that location; otherwise you place it face up in front of you. If the card is neither Bonnie nor Clyde, then you can keep the card or leave it as you wish. You then advance the car one space on the board.

• When you play a layoff – that is, one or more cards that depict a location that has already been melded – you again look at the card underneath that location (assuming it’s still there) and take it or leave it as allowed and desired. You then move the car forward or backward one space on the board.

Aside from allowing you to nab Bonnie and Clyde – each of which are worth 10 points – the movement of the car gives you a chance to score more points. Cards played when the car is on the matching location are worth four points each. Otherwise, played cards are worth only two points. What’s more, if a player ends a round by running out of cards, with the discard being mandatory, she scores points equal to the location of the car. If she also has Bonnie & Clyde in front of her – something I’ve seen once in 40+ rounds over 16 games – then all other players score nothing for the round. The game ends once someone has reached 100 points, with the player having the highest score winning the game.

Divvying Up the Crooks

Game play in Bonnie & Clyde is similar to that in other rummy games: Draw lots of matching cards, and you’re more likely to score lots of points and go out. Draw a hand of singletons, and you’ll struggle to empty your hand. As more and more melds are played on the table, the pace of the game play quickens due to more plays being available; a formerly dead singleton becomes a ticket to move the car and potentially pick up a card from the gameboard, which could then fuel more plays. Once you recognize this, you start playing “chicken” to some degree, especially with two players, as any melds you play give the opponent an opportunity to layoff cards and increase the points scored on melds due to hitting the right locations. You’ll try to stockpile cards and play them all out at once, but by doing so you miss out on the free cards on the gameboard, which can often give you safe discards or boring ol’ points.

As is natural for a rummy game, the number of players in the game greatly affects your ability to collect the cards you want and time your exit from the round. With three and four players, cards get buried in the discard pile, forcing you to burn a Ted Hinton card if you want to retrieve one.

With more cards in play due to more players, the car moves more frequently, which gives you fewer chances to hit the location you want with a meld. This, combined with the melds and layoffs being spread out among more players, keeps the round scores lower, which means you’ll take longer for someone to hit the target score, thereby equalizing (to some degree) the role of chance in the cards that the players receive to start the round. The two-player game, however, tends to end after only two rounds, as both players typically score 40-60 points. This increases the role of chance in determining a winner, so when playing with two, I recommend adopting the 200-point goal line suggested as a variant in the rules. After doing so, I started seeing comebacks and more interesting playing decisions; imagine playing Tichu to only 400 points, for example – the short goal line would reward riskier plays, and the same is true in Bonnie & Clyde.

Bring in the Law

The Ted Hinton cards are a Goldilocks feature: Don’t draw any, and you’ll suffer from living on a diet of draw-and-discard, which inhibits your ability to build a powerful hand. Draw too many, and you’ll have trouble building melds and (even worse) going out since you can rid yourself of only two at a time, one through playing and one through discarding. (I’ve already experienced the “play Ted Hinton to draw two Ted Hintons” move a number of times.) Ideally the number of Hintons that you have and draw throughout the game is Just Right.

As for the power of the Hinton card, playing with it is a mix of boring and tense. At the start of the game, if you have several copies, you’ll discard it to draw two more cards. Then you’ll do it next turn. Then again. Yawn. If you have only one copy, however, you face tougher choices: Get more cards now, or hold it in order to be able to dig in the discards later? Okay, the choices aren’t that tough, but they’re not automatic. The card you pick from the discard pile isn’t revealed to other players, so a mild deduction element occasionally creeps into the game when a player digs for something and doesn’t meld immediately. “What did she pick up? What’s safe to throw away now?” It hasn’t happened often, but the possibility is there.

Side note: I’ve yet to see someone use Hinton to look at a face-down card by the gameboard. Maybe we’re underestimating the utility that comes from looking at one card out of ten, but drawing more cards or finding a card in the discard pile always seems more valuable.

A Criminal Look

While the game play is solid and comforting – the gaming equivalent of mac-and-cheese as it’s always welcome and enjoyable, yet rarely greeted with cheers – the game’s graphic design is a disaster. Bonnie & Clyde may have years to bring to market, but not because someone was figuring out all the right things to do to make the game as attractive and usable as possible. The main problems with the graphic design are:

1. The cards are poorly indexed. The cards, which have a pleasing linen finish, aren’t indexed in four corners, or even two. Instead they have only a line of white-bordered black type across the artwork on the card, with the type showing the number and name of the location, such as “7. Erick Oklahoma”. Put this card on the other side of the table, and you can’t read it. Now spread melds among three other players, and you’ll be twisting your head like a fevered owl to keep track of which locations allow layoffs and what not to discard.

   Each location does have its own image, a tenth of the panorama shown on the gameboard, but cards 1 and 2 share the same look of blue sky over a barren landscape, while 8 and 9 both show tree leaves in front of a building, and so forth. One cool aspect of the graphic design is that the six cards for a particular location are designed to be laid out in a row to show different actions in each location: on #7, a car catches fire; on #3, Bonnie and Clyde flee a bank they just robbed. While an interesting idea, these images work against the cards’ usability, obscuring which card is which even worse than if they relied only on the line of text.

   

   The card design is a far cry from that used in the U.S. Games’ Mystery Rummy titles, which had bars of color down the left-hand edge of the cards, bars that you can easily see across the table. If a face-down card is missing from a location, then you don’t have to pause to figure out whether a meld has been played; if the card is present, however, you frequently need to look around the table, even if you were the one who played the meld! (Maybe your memory is better than mine, but there’s no excuse for a graphic design that hinders play rather than assists it. Usability and attractiveness can go hand-in-hand.)

   To allieviate this problem, I added a set of orange wooden cubes – orange to match the getaway car – and place a cube on a location whenever anyone plays a meld. Now players can look only at the gameboard to see what’s been played, looking around at each player’s holdings only if they care to know how many of each card have been played, a question that has come up infrequently.

   

2. The gameboard is littered with errors. The oddest part of the design are the numerous errors on the gameboard, errors that any proofreader should have picked up in seconds. Under the #7 location: “After a car wreck burned Bonnie kidnap two officers and wire them to a tree.” Under #8: “Bonnie and Clyde rob a local bank and get several thousand dollars. These light-hearted fotos where taken by a gang member when the…” Under #10: “The outlaw couple died, like rats burning barn, under the smothering fire of the sheriffs posse.” Egads, such errors don’t inspire confidence in the quality of the game play.

3. The back cover is non-descriptive, verging on misleading. If you knew nothing about this game or Mike Fitzgerald, how compelling would you find this back cover blurb?
   

   Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were notorious outlaws who robbed banks throughout the central United States between 1931 and 1935. Their exploits and charisma made them famous, and their story has been made into books and movies. Ted Hinton was the FBI agent charged with capturing them.

   What is the game about? Are we trying to escape capture or do the capturing? Do players take opposing sides? How do you play the game? Aside from all these questions you have weirdness in the dates listed (since B&C died in 1934) and the fact that Ted Hinton was a Deputy Sherriff in Dallas County and not an FBI agent. The text isn’t as misleading as that on Ticket to Ride, but it merits an eyebrow raise and shake of the head if nothing else.

The artwork isn’t a total wash. As I mentioned, the cards work like movie cels, showing the action at each location. The cover also stands out as something that gets across the danger of Bonnie and Clyde, while not looking like a standard game cover. It’s sophisticated and eye-catching – if only the same could be said for the rest of the graphic design.

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Comments:

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I completely agree about the physical design, Eric.  The usability is terrible and I don’t even think the artwork is particularly attractive.  Mike Fitzgerald, on the Geek, also recommends using cubes, or other markers, to show which melds have been made. Fortunately, the gameplay is good enough (and the 4 year wait long enough) that I’m still happy with my copy.  The movement of the getaway car is a simple enough idea, but there are some nice subtle tricks that can be employed with it.  I think Bonnie and Clyde is as good as any of the other games in the series, which is pretty high praise. By the way, before last week, all my games of this had been with Fitzgerald (or with Mike and a third player).  It was quite educational to see the way Mike plays, which exposed some of the game’s depth to me.  For example, Mike uses Hinton to peek at a board card fairly frequently.  I think the idea is to decide whether to use a meld or layoff for car movement or to save it to capture Bonnie or Clyde.  There’s also the potential for gaining a card or for some bluffing.  I’m not at that level of mastery yet, but it did show that Hinton can be used in some inventive ways.  Good stuff. Mike thinks the sweet spot for the game is 3 players.  I enjoy it with both 2 and 3 (and I like your suggestion of a 200 point goal for the 2 player game).  Since the other MR games don’t really work with 3 players, it’s a real plus that B&C does.  (Wyatt Earp is probably best with 3, but I dislike the bullet mechanic so much that I tend to avoid it; I’m glad I now have Bonnie and Clyde as a counter-suggestion when we have three.) Posted by Larry Levy on Mar 18, 2009 at 01:09 PM | #

Thanks for the note, Larry, as well as the comments on Mike’s playing style. Clearly a good idea for me would be to use the Hinton cards to look at the face-down cards as suggested to see whether that improves my game. Playing always trumps speculating, yet I was content to decide without evidence that option three wasn’t worth trying. Bad Eric – no biscuit. Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 18, 2009 at 01:38 PM | #

Great update Eric. But isn’t “graphic design verging on the criminal” quite appropriate for Bonnie and Clyde? Posted by Alan How on Mar 18, 2009 at 03:19 PM | #

Perhaps, Alan, but given their fate I don’t think that’s an ideal aspiration! Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 18, 2009 at 03:30 PM | #

I’d describe it as a triumph of graphic design over usability.  There were so many excellent graphic design features used in previous Mystery Rummy games (and gee indexing of cards has been known for a number of <i>centuries<i> now!) that have been thrown away or ignored to the detriment of playability.  This may also be the first card game I ever sleeve, since the Bonnie & Clyde cards are going to get less wear than the normal cards and are thus likely to become fairly obvious on the board as the deck gets more and more plays. Bitching about the graphic design and usability over, we really liked it two player and are looking forward to trying it with more. P.S.  I wonder when or who made the decision to change to the colour of the car from black (as per the image on the back of the box) to orange?  I doubt that there were many orange cars back in the early 1930s ;-) Posted by Fraser McHarg on Mar 18, 2009 at 07:33 PM | #

Ah, yes, the car – or rather the “crime spree figure,” as it’s referred to in the rules, making me think that the rules were translated into German, then back into English. Why else would the phrase “getaway car” not be used? Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 18, 2009 at 08:05 PM | #

I’m still partial to Wyatt Earp and think the graphic design on that one is the best of the lot.  And because, as Eric mentions, luck of the draw is always a major factor in rummy variants, I don’t mind the bullet mechanic so much, even though is always seemed that my wife was a much sharper shooter in our many of our two-player games. I do enjoy seeing how Mr. Fitzgerald continues to come up with interesting mechanics to spice up rummy, and the getaway car sounds intriguing, but I’ll probably keep going back to WE. Posted by Jeff Allers on Mar 19, 2009 at 04:37 PM | #

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