Game Review: Desperados

By Kevin Burtt
September 16, 2009

Designer: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: FRED Distribution (Gryphon Games)

Players: 2-4
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $15
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Three, twice with 4 players as teams and once with 3 players

Reiner Knizia’s Desperados is a new 2009 reprint – published by FRED Distribution through its Gryphon Games line – of one of the Great Doctor’s earliest designs, a game originally called Diggers that Hexagames released way back in 1990. In contrast to the recent trend of “cooperative-with-a-traitor” games, Desperados is deliberately designed for four players divided into two teams à la Bridge – an under-utilized design space in gaming, it seems. (Desperados can still be played as a standard “every-man-for-himself” game with 2-4 players, although the rules make clear this is sub-optimal. We tried it “cutthroat” once, and the rules are right…)

The deck contains sixty cards (of good solid quality and production), divided as follows:

• Nine “open” mine cards (three each of gold, silver, and copper)
• Nine “close” mine cards
• Twelve desperados with values between 1 and 12
  
• Thirty “chest” cards of gold, silver, and copper

Game play is simple: Each player/team looks to open mine cards in front of them, after which they can place “chest” cards of the appropriate color on top. After adding as many points as they think they can get away with, mines can be shut down through “close” cards, after which the points are locked in for that team.

Mines that are left open for too long can be stolen away by the other team through “desperado” cards.  An opposing player places a numbered desperado card on someone’s open mine, after which that player or team has one turn to respond with a defending desperado card (if they have one). Teammates of the attacker and defender can also contribute a card to the attack or defense if desired. After everyone has had a turn, the conflict is resolved with the higher valued desperado card(s) gaining (or maintaining) control of the mine.

On each turn, players can either choose to draw a new card from the deck, pass a card (face down) to their partner, or play a card onto the table. The round ends when the deck is exhausted, with any mine still open not scoring any points at all.

Desperados is a simple game, although it contains more depth than you might think from just a glance at the rules. As in Bridge (or Hearts) the limited nature of the cards lends itself to card counting being an important skill to develop. With only twelve desperado cards (each with a unique value), players can tell which numbers remain to be played. Lower-valued cards can grow in utility once higher valued cards have already been exhausted, and players’ strategies can change significantly from turn to turn according to the changing odds of certain cards still being either in the deck or in opponents’ hands.

Desperados has interesting ideas and we did have fun with it, but a few weaknesses prevent the game from being a true success. Some analysis of these:

The “Green Light” problem: In the classic game Mille Bornes, players race to travel great distances to score points.  Before they can travel kilometer 1, though, they have to have a “Roll!” card (a green light) in order to start moving at all. If opposing players throw hazards in their path, players have to find a specific solution card and then another green light to start moving again. If players don’t have exactly the right card for their situation – a frequent occurrence – a frustrating stalemate can be created, where players end up drawing and discarding, turn after turn, looking for the card they need to start playing the game again.

Desperados has a similar ‘critical path’ problem: Players first have to play a mine card in order to play chests, which also have to match color. There are only three mine cards of each color in the deck, so it’s quite possible (and it happened frequently in our play sessions) that players end up with a handful of colored chest cards that they can’t play because they don’t have the appropriately colored mine. Mines also need to be completed with a “close” card or else they don’t score points at all – another situational requirement where an unlucky series of draws can cripple a player or team’s chance of success.

Passing Cards: Having Desperados be a team game with partners may be an idea that sounds better in theory than in practice. In actual game play, there isn’t a lot of working together. (Players are, in fact, forbidden from discussing strategy or cards they hold directly with each other.)

While a player can pass a card to his partner, our play group had a tough time imagining a realistic situation where that would be a useful move, given that passing takes your entire turn. (You wouldn’t pass your partner a gold chest card, for example, even if you had a gold mine card you were preparing to play, because it takes your turn to do so. Playing the mine, then waiting for your next turn to play the chest yourself is still more efficient than passing the chest, then having to wait a turn to open the mine.)

There are possible situations in which a player holding lots of desperado cards might pass one to a partner to prepare for a coordinated attack or defense, but those situations were rare. Passing as a game play element doesn’t quite work – in practice, each team member draws and plays his own cards without passing and simply hopes that his partner ends up with the right cards to help the common cause.

Close Cards: Contrary to the title, the key cards in Desperados aren’t the desperado cards but, in fact, the “close mine” cards. In fact, in practice the team that happens to draw the majority of the nine “close mine” cards through the course of the game has a huge advantage over the other team.

What makes the “close mine” cards so powerful?

• You lock down opponents: Just as you can deflate – literally! – an opponent in Mille Bornes who finally found her green light by giving her a flat tire, Desperados allows players to put “close” cards on the other team’s mines after they are opened. Imagine the frustration when a team has searched desperately for a gold mine in order to play the gold chests building up in their hands – and their opponent simply closes it immediately, making that team start all over again, drawing and waiting… A team that gets an unbalanced draw of close cards compared to their opponents – especially early in the game – can lock down an opponent from scoring at all, just as easily as some islands and a handful of counterspells can in Magic: The Gathering.

  (And there’s even a more diabolical “lock-down” method for a team with more close cards than their opponents: Open mines score no points at the end of the round unless they’ve been closed, no matter how many chests they hold.  A team with an advantage in close cards can hoard them and happily allow their opponent to open and build mines right up until the round ends, leaving them unable to score anything because no close cards remain in the deck.)

• You can defend against attacks: If a team doesn’t have close cards, it’s probably rich with desperados, right? So can’t locked-down opponents simply steal the other team’s open mines? Not necessarily – Desperados also allows players to close mines that are currently under attack from an opposing desperado. In that case, the dispute ends immediately, the attacking desperado(s) are discarded, and the defenders retain possession of the mine regardless of the original desperado strength against them.

  If this sounds like a powerful defense, it is. The rules guard against this tactic by causing the defending team to discard one of the chest cards on the mine as a penalty if they close the mine while it is under dispute.

  Makes sense…however, in practice the penalty isn’t strong enough. Even with the penalty, there’s no incentive not to close a mine of yours that’s under attack, even if it holds only one chest card. (Scoring nothing is still better than giving the other team free points.) In our team sessions, disputes were always resolved by closing the mine if either defending team member had a close card – an unfortunate circumstance that more or less defeats the purpose of the desperado mechanic in the first place.

The end result is that close cards tend to determine the game. During our team sessions I kept track of which team happened to draw the majority of close cards throughout each round, and the team that did scored more points than the other almost 100% of the time. It seems a weakness in the design that one particular class of card can unbalance a game entirely on its own.

Summary: In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, a character says: “At the moment it’s just a Notion, but I think I could turn it into a Concept, and then an Idea!” In that vein, Desperados has some interesting “notions” and “concepts” that, I think, haven’t quite been developed enough into solid game “ideas.” As it stands, Desperados is a little too dependent on the luck of the draw to be a fulfilling strategy game. Plus, the use of close cards to block attacks and lock out opponents’ mines tends to dampen scoring and reduce the fun.

Since Desperados is a very early Knizia design, we can probably chalk this design up as a “warm-up” game of sorts, a stepping stone to better games in the future. Desperados may be interesting from a historical perspective – a view into the early years of one of gaming’s top designers – but is it worth being reprinted in 2009? Hard to say… Players interested in team games with partners may want to check out Desperados as a change of pace from the usual cutthroat action, but the title probably isn’t one that’s going to make anyone’s list of “Top Ten Knizia Games.”

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Comments:

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I played Digging for the first time a few months ago, and we were passing cards all the time.  Giving your partner information is often worth quite a bit, enough to make it reasonable to give up your turn to pass a card.  I don’t remember enough about the game to show specific examples, but I remember being pretty satisfied that the passing mechanism worked well. Posted by Doug Orleans on Sep 20, 2009 at 07:07 PM | #

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