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Raise your Goblets!

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Author:
Tim Page

Publisher:
HORRIBLE GAMES
2016

No. of Players:
2-12

EVALUATION

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Gamebox author Ralf Togler writes about the game:

The Italian publisher HORRIBLE GAMES is growing. Just over three years ago, Lorenzo Silva started with his own company publishing cool and funny games. Most of the games since then were designed by himself alone or him as a co-designer. Now we have the first game that he only supervised as an art director and project manager, so let us see how that worked:

With age drinking games are becoming more and more exhausting and unpopular. So a lot of grown-ups proceed to play games about drinking rather than drinking games in the proper sense. It is much more digestible to enjoy a cup of wine or a beer while playing The Red Inn or Sake & Samurai than being forced to knock back a booze just because you have lost a bet.

This applies in particular dimensions when poison comes into play. OK, poisoning people with a cup of wine is quite unpopular in our modern times. But in the middle Ages this method shortened the one or other life, especially of a lot of aristocrats. So while bringing out the toasts, the one or other person will already have thought about her future life without the bothersome person in front of his or her...

Raise your Goblets is such a game of toasts, poising and flawless etiquette, so the under-title of HORRIBLE GAMES newest game tells us. And indeed it is. Every player gets his own huge plastic Goblet that is filled during the game and must be drunk at the end of a round. All players have their own character in form of a character card with individual abilities. Perhaps somewhat unusual is the fact, that the target card, that every player draws at the beginning of the game and which tells us whose character we should poison, is revealed for everyone. So you can not only try to reach your own goal, but also interfere your opponent's moves.

Of course there is no drinking without an appetizer and so all Goblets, which are placed in the middle of the table (so that no one can look inside), are initially filled with a first ingredient. Unfortunately next to the wine there are also two poison and an antidote among those randomly distributed ingredients. Finally all players are also equipped with a supply of wine, poison markers and antidotes that are kept hidden from the other players behind a player screen.

In a turn a player can either pour any of his remaining ingredients secretly in a Goblet of his choice. So more and more poison will end up in the cups. But luckily enough there is also the possibility to peek into your Goblet, which is the one that actually stands in front of you. That is important to know, because the positions of the Goblets will change during the game. A player in turn can either choose the rotate action, moving all Goblets one place to the left or right, or exchange his Goblet with the Goblet of another player with the swap action. This goes on until one of the players calls a toast.

This is the moment when the truth comes to light. After everyone had a last action, everyone must drink up his Goblet (again the one actually in front of him). Each antidote eliminates a poison, but if there is more poison that you can adsorb, you are stone-dead. Victory points are dealt to those players who have survived the round, who were successful poisoning their target and who had the most wine in their Goblet. Players with dead characters take a new character card and the next round of drinking begins.

Three courses (rounds) are served in a game, which normally takes about 30-40 minutes. I think that Raise your Goblets is an entertaining game with a lot of chances to talk big, tease your opponents and fell a certain mischievous when your opponents find much more poison in their Goblets than they had expected. Because, although it seems to be easy to remember which cup is still “safe” to drink, most players quickly loose overview.

I loved Raise your Goblets as a funny filler or party game for later hours, especially for larger groups (up to 12 players are possible). If you do not take the game too seriously, it does not matter that not all character cards are perfectly balanced for every number of players. Although they can give you the one or other advantage during the game, it is much more important to remember which of the goblets contains a digestible drink and which one is already poisoned. I solved the minor problem of some unbalanced cards by allowing players to draw another character card if they do not feel comfortable with their actual one. As there are 21 cards, this shouldn’t be major thing. So raise your goblets and let us hope that despite the poison we will meet again!


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