Ratzia

Hello. So, today I want to talk to you about the game Ratzia or because it's inspired by the game Raw Ratzia. And I must say I am loving all of these RAW inspired games that 25th Century has sent me. And I really need to try playing RAW now because if I'm loving these this much, I can only imagine how much I will love RAW.

So, in this game, you will have some auction cards and it plays two to five players. So, if you are playing a two or three player game, you will get four auction cards. And if you're playing a four or five player game, you will get three. And they at the beginning of the game are dealt out in a specific way.

And they are face up, so everybody knows what auction cards you have. And the game is played over three rounds. You have this score tracker here. And I love all of the icons on the little score cubes. They're very like ' 90s inspired. You've got a cool Polaroid camera. You've got a roller skate. You've got sunglasses and a cassette.

And then on the opposite side is the 50 points. So, if you manage to get that many points, it will keep going. So, you'll score at the end of each round. And then there's also final game scoring after that third round. So, everybody also gets a nice player aid. So, it tells you what's going to score when.

And then it gives you a reference on the back. So, everything is very clear. And this game, I feel like pretty much anyone can play because it's one of those games that the more you play, you develop strategy, but you can also just kind of be like, "Yeah, let's let's swing it. Let's see how it goes.

Let's develop strategy along the way." So, you don't have to be an expert gamer to play this. And you can even play with younger kiddos. You have a bunch of cards, and they are different types that are going to score in different ways, which the player aid will tell you. Most of them you will score at the end of the round and then discard.

But if they have the cool neon palm tree symbol, those you will save until the end of the game because you will get to score them then. There are also police cards in this deck. And every time the seventh police card comes out, that's what signals the end of the round and signals it immediately. If it's not the seventh police card, then it triggers an auction that people may optionally bid in.

So on your turn, you are either going to flip a card or you are going to declare an auction. If you declare an auction, you get this fun cheese grater and the person next to you starts bidding. They may bid or pass. And then the next person may bid or pass. And then when it comes to you, if you're the last person and nobody bid, you must bid and you will get all of the cards in the row, which can be great because there's really good cards out there.

Also, if someone bids and then it keeps going around and comes back to you, you can choose to up the bid or you can choose to pass at that point as well. So, it may go around a couple of times if it's a really juicy auction. If you win the auction, you have to discard the card that you won the auction with.

So, maybe I won it with the 10. And you take the one card that is in the pile and to start out, it will be the one. Now, if I want it with the 10, the next person who wins an auction will discard their card and they will take this 10. So, the cards you have are constantly changing. And when you bring that new card into your hand, it will be face down because once you have four face down cards, you can no longer play that round.

You have nothing to bid with. So, you don't get to play. If everybody has all four of their cards flipped face down, then that will signal the end of the round or it will be those seven police cards as I said. So, what are some of the things on these cards? So, we will flip it out. So, there's a movie theater.

That is a business. And businesses are going to score at the end. You can see that by the palm tree. And then the next person will go and they're going to flip out and that's a getaway car. And the auction row can only ever have seven items in it. If it hits that seventh item, then that will also trigger an auction.

And so the person who flipped the seventh item, they will take the cheese grater and the auction will begin. And that's considered a voluntary auction because a player didn't choose to accept it. It was forced. And so nobody has to bid in that one. If you declare an auction, someone must bid. So then we flip out another car.

We get a train station, which is another business. And then we get a pizzeria and we're at four. And then a pocket watch. And those are trinkets and different types of trinkets you need because if you don't get them, you lose points. And then a gangster. 1 2 3 4 5 six. And then a trinket. So we would now be at a forced auction.

So this is where people may choose to bid or not. And whoever wins, like I said, discards the card they won with and they get all of these cards in front of themsel. And then we go on to another auction. So again, oh, see, now we have a police car. police card and only one card out there. We're gonna have an auction now.

And this may be a case where people just decide to pass because they don't necessarily want to spend one of their cards to get just one card. So then we that auction nobody got anything. So those items are simply discarded. And then we go into our next auction. Oh, and there's another police card. So you can see sometimes these auctions get really big and awesome and there's great things that you want and sometimes they're triggered and there's not a lot out there.

So, you have to decide whether or not you want to bid because if they're cards you really need, it could be worth bidding on one or two cards. So, once we get our seventh police card out there or everyone has used all of their auction cards, and I tend to find it is more often that you get the seven police cards rather than everyone using their auction cards, then we go into end of round scoring and we discard anything that has the either our artifacts, anything that doesn't have the palm tree on it.

You're going to score and you're going to discard and you're going to keep anything with the palm tree in front of you because it will score at the end of the game. The other interesting card that is in here are the thieves. So, if you have won a thief in an auction, you can then on your turn use the thief to take an item from the auction pile and it is yours.

You cannot steal from other players, but you can steal from the auction before the auction occurs. So that in a nutshell is how you play Ratzia. I think it is a ton of fun and it is quick, it's easy, it's fun to try up different strategies to see what works for you. But this is a great game. So like I said, it makes me really want to try RAW.

I believe this is the first time that this has been available in the US or in North America that it previously was only like a European release. So this is a great game. Go ahead and check it out. Give me a like and a follow and I'll keep bringing you more board game content. Thanks. Bye.