Off With Their Heads Card Game Review
Off With Their Heads is the ongoing campaign for Druid City Games to make their Wonderlands Wars IP a place to base a lot of their titles. It’s a clever move in terms of marketing familiarity, where you feel almost obliged to collect or at the very least try all of the games in the set. Its a risk as well, as one bad game can potentially bring down the entire house of cards in one swoop of the axe. So in this case, we end up with a flip and write game with all of the characters we know and potentially like already and we just need to worry as to whether there is enough game here to warrant the time and trouble.
Fanfare and Bluster
Druid City Games for me have always been about of bit of fanfare and bluster, almost like the Queen of Hearts herself, and so I was surprised that Off With Their Heads arrives in such a conservatively smaller box, and secondly that in terms of production, compared to other Druid City titles, I would argue that this one almost lacks in the expected levels of production. That’s not a bad thing. My previous experience of their games is that they’ll generally use more where they can get away with it and so to have a game that exists as a deck of cards, a note pad, a standee and a circular piece of card is surprising. To be honest, rather refreshing.
The genre of flip and write seems to have calmed down over the last couple of years and settled down into something of it’s own quiet genre in the hobby space. I’ve recently enjoyed Flip Pick Towers, a game about creating castle, keeping royalty happy and avoiding dragons. So I was equally intrigued to see how OWTH would pan out especially since it centres around the use of a deck of cards as its main mechanic. Yes, you read that right. In a game based around the Queen of Hearts it makes a silly amount of sense to base the flip conditions around a simple deck of cards which will ring a tiny bell in the head of anyone who is a fan of the source material.
Trick Taking Hybrid
Off With Their Heads is like a hybrid trick taking game and roll and write. The main mechanics aren’t that complicated to understand. Looking at your score sheet there are three main areas you can score in, The Meadow, The Woods and The Keep. There are spaces for number to be marked down and peppered across the score sheet are characters that have little tick boxes next them. None of it makes sense, but all I know is that I want to be putting some numbers in these boxes the best way I can. Getting numbers into these boxes is where the trick taking magic happens.
That circle of cardboard I mentioned earlier, titled the wonderland board has pictures of the four card suits set like the points in a compass, and the Queen of Hearts is set at one of these points. That becomes the lead suit for the round. The order of seniority then follows in a clockwise fashion, so if the queen was on the Hearts space, it would Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds then Spades. Players are then ordered based on that and then can mark their sheets based on where their number appears in that order. So you can play a high card Spade and still have you card be in last place, or play a low Heart card and still appear first in the queue. Because the led suit changes every round as the queen rotates around the mini board, it opens up a small level of tactical play, not enough to burn the brain, but enough to get you thinking. Your hand size starts at nine cards, which seems to be a huge choice, but you’ll only play seven of those cards and it’s not long before you’re really trying to gain that led suit or not. Your final position in the queue decides where you’ll then be marking your own score sheet, so winning every time is fine, providing you don’t want to be filling up any of the lower parts of your score sheet.
Oh that score sheet. So it’s not too complicated, but it is one of those games where there are several considerations that need to be taking into account as you are making your marks. You want to be following the rules of number placement in order to gain yourself the maximum number of end game points, especially when it comes to The Woods and making sure you are following the Jabberwocky’s rule which can give you a huge whack of points at the end of the game. You’ve got to make sure that all your guests attend if you can, who will rock up if you mark your sheet in a particular way, them meadow needs its mushrooms all marked, the Keep has you attacking the castle from both sides, and if you decide you want to mark extra spaces with the same number, then you can rely on a teacup to allow you this action all providing you’ve gained them as you play.
So Off With Their Heads starts to develop more in terms of the importance of the were and when, which then has you thinking back to the cards in your hand, and when you want to be playing cards when you know they are part of the led suit and when you need to play garbage to hit the second and third levels. To cap this all off, the two cards that you’ve been holding onto at the end of every round will then be used in the ultimate poker showdown, where you are trying to score the best hand based on the six cards that you held back on to give you some last minute bonus points.
OWTH is a solid semi trick and write game which doesn’t try to be too clever with how it plays. I would try to avoid playing it with less than the optimal four players, as the card selection is then filled out with random drawn cards, that take away the obvious decision making that has occurred when four real players are playing. I also wonder a bit about the overall longevity of the game, as The Woods strategy seems like the obvious choice considering the number of points you’ll get, but this is the normal fate of most roll and writes, that they can occasional end up having an obvious route to success, regardless of the other points that are on offer.
For myself, it’s going to be something that sits alongside Flip Pick Towers, something that will sit in the background when we fancy something different to play that can be easily taught to new players, or will be a score attack for returning players. I like this kind of game from Druid City, where the normal bluster and large production values has been left to the side, and the game is having to stand on the strength of its mechanics rather than the sheer amount of bling and plastic enclosed in an overly huge box. Long may it continue.
Designed – JB Howell & Michael Mihealsick
Illustration – Manny Trembly
Buy Here – We don’t earn monies from this
