Base price: $20.
2 – 8 players.
Play time: ~30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 15 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Skull King was provided by Grandpa Beck’s Games.

Miss or love the original version of Skull King from Grandpa Beck’s Games? Read my full review of the original for more information, strategy advice, and all that stuff. I just discovered how to make these little boxes!

We’re back with a revisit! I had kind of planned to, at some point, do a full Revisit Review format, where I dig into a game that I loved in the past and talk about how my opinion has changed on it over time. Unfortunately, my backlog of deeply unreviewed games has made that very challenging, though there are a few I’d love to talk about again, from Catan to Cursed Court to something that doesn’t start with a C. I was originally going to say Carcassonne and then I got mad at myself for the deeply unnecessary alliteration. We’re moving on. But sometimes, there’s a serendipitous overlap of events, where a game releases a new edition that I can dive into, from … Carcassonne to The Quest for El Dorado to The Quacks of Quedlinburg, eventually. Skull King is one such case. It won’t be in this revisit format I’ve envisioned, but there’s still a lot to dig into, so let’s check it out!

In Skull King, players are tasked with a simple goal: get the most points! If you’ve ever played a trick-taking game, that’s not hard to wrap your head around. Play the best card of the led suit, win the trick. Skull King amps that up a bit by forcing you to bid in advance with how many tricks you plan to win. Get your bid right? 20 points per trick you won. Get it wrong? -10 points per trick you were off by. Not the kindest environment to work in, but what can you do? While my original review covered some of the cards, there are many special cards added to this new version that change things up. There’s mermaids and loot cards and a big whale, among other things. What new depths will emerge in this ocean of trick-taking? Only one way to find out!

Overall: 9.25 / 10

I could genuinely play Skull King forever. Currently am doing just that on Board Game Arena, but I feel like I should at least elaborate. When I first played Skull King in person, I thought it was brilliant (hence my original review). Ironically, it’s somewhat diametrically-opposed to my other favorite trick-taking game, The Crew. The Crew is an incredible achievement in cooperative team-based play, and Skull King is an absolute bloodbath of a free-for-all where there is (almost) no loyalty, trust, or kindness. Both are useful in certain contexts, I suppose, but Skull King knows how to be fun, from its silly betting system to the wild twists and turns of an individual round.

As I explained above, it’s a particularly-intense trick-taking game: you’ve got three major suits, a trump suit, and special cards that can be played out of suit to help you win or lose. Of those special cards, three exist in a rock-paper-scissors arrangement: a Pirate always wins (and always beats a Mermaid), but always loses to the Skull King; the Skull King always wins (and always beats a Pirate), but always loses to a Mermaid; a Mermaid always wins (and always beats The Skull King), but always loses to a Pirate. This balance at the top makes trying to supercede any trick dangerous, and unlike last month’s Mythical Dice, you always know what you have in hand at the beginning of a round and can (usually) plan accordingly. The second edition codified this relationship (the previous edition made Mermaids optional), and I think that’s fun, though I miss the days of the Skull King beating everything. The Pirates have optional abilities as well that can really flip when you look to play them (or avoid playing them). One particularly excellent new addition is the pair of the Kraken and the White Whale, both of which can absolutely mess up your plans. The Kraken annihilates a trick so that it never existed, meaning nobody wins; the White Whale cancels out all special cards so that the highest-value card wins. Both turn expectations on their heads and keep players guessing, as it gets increasingly likely that one will show up. To make matters worse, Skull King has a notoriously brutal points system, where any incorrect bid gets you exclusively negative scores for that round. As the round increases, so do the points that you can gain (and that you can lose), leading to a round 10 showstopper where players are betting big, swinging for the fences, and occasionally absolutely cannibalizing their own score.

Where Skull King struggles is in two particular spots: first off, this is a reasonably-advanced trick-taking game, as all games where you bet on the number of tricks you’ll win tend to be. Since scoring is pretty mean and there’s a lot of backstabbing and negative player interaction, I’d strongly recommend against trying this out with players who are new to trick-taking. It helps to know some of the flows and have some experience playing certain ways before you start, lest you get thrown to the deep negative part of the scoring and stay there the whole game. That’s less fun. I love Skull King and I think it’s a difficult first trick-taking game; these aren’t incompatible views. The second is more at the ethos of the game itself. Skull King is at its best when you’re playing risky and living the pirate’s life; that said, there are often rounds and hands where you’re strongly incentivized to not do that. You know you can take two tricks in round 10 and it’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to take zero or more than two. Betting two, however, isn’t particularly interesting. You won’t get the points you need to win and you will lose if you bet anything else. You’re kind of stuck. Personally, I think that’s the right time to risk it all for a zero-trick run, but there’s lots of perfectly valid reasons to not do that, and that can feel a bit boring. Thankfully, my normal Skull King group is just as high-minded as I am, so we’re making bad bets constantly and I’m never stuck in that rut. I acknowledge that it can happen, though, and the game doesn’t really have much of a way of dealing with that, as opposed to say, Hearts, where you pass cards each round to try and let yourself maneuver a bit with your hand.

That all said, Skull King remains an all-timer for me, so I was delighted to get a chance to try out this updated version. There is a booster pack, though, and that adds 15 new cards, so hopefully that gets added to Board Game Arena at some point or I can convince my friends to play that with me next. If you’re thrilled by trick-taking at its most cutthroat, you enjoy pirates as a theme (you get to yell “yo-ho-ho” when you bid!), or you just want to destroy an entire trick with a Kraken, look no further than the second edition of Skull King! It’s a fantastic upgrade to an already-excellent game.

Looking for more card game favorites? Check out my picks for the best trick-taking games, drafting games, and more!

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