Base price: $XX.
3 – 4 players.
Play time: ~60 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter! (Will update link when Kickstarter is live.)
Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Charms was provided by New Mill Industries. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
Back with another week of trick-taking! I’m super excited for this week, since it’s Charms and My Favourite Things (previously Eye My Favorite Things), and I love talking about these games. It kind of spoils the review when I say that I like the game straight outta the gate, but what can you do? I write at my own pace and in my own season. It’s part of the charm, I think. A lot has been going on here and I’ve been a little stressed lately, so it’s nice to be back in the routine of just writing about games and taking photos of games. To that end, let’s get to it!
In Charms, players are pretty much playing a classic trick-taking game. There’s just one problem. Some of your cards are suits and the other cards are numbers. Are you supposed to just make one card from both components? Looks that way! Use your wits and your strategy to bid on how many tricks you’ll win and the construct the cards that will get you there! Will you be able to score as few points as possible?
Contents
Setup
So this one’s going to be a little different than standard trick-taking fare. Shuffle the deck, as usual:
You’ll notice two types of cards: suits and numbers. Deal each player 13 cards from the deck. If anyone got fewer than three suit cards or fewer than three number cards, shuffle their hand with the deck and redeal to them until that’s no longer the case. Now, flip the top card of the deck until you reveal a suit; that’s the trump card for this round.
Everyone then bids on how many tricks they think they can win after looking at their hand; use the black buttons to keep track.
The player to the left of the dealer starts!
Gameplay
Charms is a very cool trick-taking game where your suit and your number aren’t necessarily connected! Try to match your bid in order to win, or else you’ll get points that you don’t want.
To start a round, every player plays two cards. Note that this only applies to the first trick. They must play one suit and one number in front of themselves. Once the lead player has played a suit and a number, the next player does so and so on. As with most trick-taking games, if you have a suit card of the led suit in your hand, you must play that suit with your number card. You can always choose whatever number you want.
After all players have played their pair of cards, the highest-value card of the trump suit wins! If no trump cards were played, the highest-value card of the led suit wins! If there’s a tie, the tied player who played latest wins the trick. Either way, the winner of the trick takes a white button, places it on top of a black button (or nearby, if their black buttons are all occupied) and leads the next trick. Unlike most trick-taking games, they don’t actually take the cards; leave them where they are.
For the next eleven tricks, players will only play one card. This will be either a suit or a number. Note that you must still follow suit, so if your face-up suit card isn’t the led suit, you have to change it if you can (and you aren’t allowed to cover it unless you have no more suit cards in hand).
After every player has played out their hand, the round ends!
- If you met your bed, you score 0 points. Points are bad.
- If you missed your bid by one in either direction, you score 1 point.
- If you missed your bid by two in either direction, you score 3 points.
- If you missed your bid by three in either direction, you score 5 points.
Take the cards, shuffle, and reset for a new round. Once four rounds have been played, the player with the lowest score wins!
Player Count Differences
Kind of the same thing as Inflation!, here; I don’t really notice a ton of differences with player count. At four, you’re using more of the deck, so it’s a bit easier to count cards and know for a fact that you’ve seen all of the trump suit or something so that you can better plan around hitting your bid. With three players, you may genuinely not know if someone’s holding on to a card or if it remains in the deck to blight you forever. You know, standard stuff. It really boils down to the kind of game you want. If you want trick-taking that’s a lot of reading players and trying to guess what they’re playing and why, four-player is the way to go since more of the cards are out. If you want high chaos and to ride a bit by the seat of your pants, three-player is usually going to do that for you. Frankly, I enjoy both, so I don’t really have a huge preference.
Strategy
- Don’t feel like you need to bid high! You can still earn 0 points in a round if you only bid 2 or 3; just make sure you can lose tricks effectively!
- Be careful about placing a high number or the trump suit! If you’re not careful and you get stuck with them, you might start winning tricks and be unable to stop!
- Have an escape plan, lest you win too many tricks. Like I said, you should try to hold a non-trump suit card or a low number so that you can bail out once you’ve met your bid. You can go the other way, though, and save a high card and try to win the last few tricks, but players may make that harder for you if they haven’t met their bids yet either! I usually find it
- Drawing out other players’ high cards or trump suit cards can pin them instead of you. If you stick another player with all the tricks, you can get away with a lot! You might even be able to get into an ideal state where you force one player to take all the remaining tricks, meaning that your other opponents don’t get anything!
- Be thoughtful about your bid. There’s nothing to prove here; you just want to meet it.
- You should try to count how many cards you’ve seen of various suits or numbers. Keeping track of your opponents’ played cards can tell you what you can expect or what cards are no longer available, so you know what you don’t have to worry about.
- If you’re trying to get rid of a certain suit card, remember: you can play it on top of a suit card of the same type if you’re following suit. Following suit can still be achieved by playing a card of the led suit on top of the card of the led suit you already have. You don’t need to actually “change” the card that you’re playing from trick to trick.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The art style is very fun! I like it. I like the suits well enough and the color scheme a lot, but my favorite thing is currently the subtle shapes on all of the number cards! Each number card has a pattern on it where the number of sides that the shape has corresponds to the number’s value. It’s very elegant.
- Also nicely portable. Again, this will just fit in a backpack or a Quiver no sweat. It’s also great for carry-on suitcases.
- The button stacking to indicate “won” tricks is pretty useful. Inflation! did it too, and I liked it there as well. Feels a bit unfair not to like it here.
- The entire conceit of “constructing” a card with a suit and a number is super neat. It makes me feel like I have more manual control over a bad hand, since I can effectively “keep” the same card for multiple tricks by strategically playing suit or number cards. Or I can change it up pretty quickly if that’s what I want. There are a lot of cool opportunities.
- I really enjoy the strategy of figuring out when you want to change your number versus your suit. It’s very cool. Balancing all the strategy of it is super neat! I really like when you want to stop taking tricks how you might be conned into continuing (to your own peril; don’t forget that points are bad). It’s cool to have to figure out when and how to hit the brakes.
- There are a ton of twists and turns and wild outcomes, sometimes! It can be chaotic in a very fun way. I’ve seen a player get stuck unable to lose tricks because their last suit card was the trump suit; I’ve seen players have too wild of a range of bids and cause nothing but problems; I’ve seen all kinds of stuff.
Mehs
- This one runs a bit long for me. It’s the four total rounds thing! It makes the game end up taking an hour, at times, and that can be a bit longer than I feel like it needs. We usually end up playing a round or two, or we play a bunch. It’s okay, but I would love a shorter game.
Cons
- Similarly to Inflation!, I find trick-taking games with bidding are harder to teach / learn. I think this is generally more complicated than Inflation!, just because there are legitimately novel strategies you have to use in order to make sure you play the right cards at the right times to meet your bid, but I also just find that games with bidding are harder to teach, since you need to kind of understand the game (or just bid 12 / number of players, I suppose) in order to do well.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I think Charms is another pretty great game! It really highlights the strategy behind trick-taking, since now you have direct control (sort of) of the cards you’re playing, and you can tweak either the number or the suit independently as your needs change. Granted, that’s a little complicated, and it’s fun and interesting to see how new players bid in their first game while they’re still figuring it out. Bidding in trick-taking games isn’t every player’s favorite thing, but it does work pretty interestingly, here. I just think it makes the game more complicated to learn. That said, Charms is, as the name would imply, charming. The art style is pleasant and interesting to look at, the game is fun and engaging, and playing it reminds me of all the things I like about trick-taking in a small package. It manages to somewhat-seamlessly blend novel concepts with the feel of a classic trick-taking game, so I think this definitely has a place in the library of the trick-taking enthusiast. I’m certainly excited about having this long-term. If you’re a fan of trick-taking, you want to change it up a bit, or you just enjoy bidding with your tricks, I’d definitely recommend trying out Charms! It’s been super fun.
If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!
What's Eric Playing? 