Hell of a Deal Board Game Review
Transcript
It's poker against the devil. He's cheating, so you can too. Thanks for joining us at Tantrum House Studiod. I'm Melissa Del.
And I'm Kevin Delp. So, hell of a deal. Where do we start?
Well, I'm going to start by saying that I think this game is going to be in my top 10 games of this year.
What? Okay.
I really enjoyed it.
Before we get to our opinions, which I'm glad you have opinions about it, let's cover some of the basics. Hell of a Deal is a co-op poker game for one to four players that takes about 90 minutes to play.
It's designed by Cameron Reed and published by Smirk and Dagger Games.
They gave us this copy to review. And in this video, we'll give a quick overview of the game and then we'll share our thoughts. In Hell of a Deal, you're playing Texas Holde style poker. If your group can make it past the devil's minions with enough soul chips, you'll face off against the devil himself at the big table. The game is played over multiple rounds, usually six. At the beginning of each round, you reveal a boss card, which shows the boss's minimum winning hand, and any additional rules or penalties for the round.
Players are dealt three cards instead of two. You can think of that extra card as one up your sleeve. Uh, to win this game, you're going to cheat.
Like Texas Holdem, at certain points, you'll need to bet to stay in the game or fold. There's no checking. Your chips though are unusual. You have souls, the currency of the game, and power chips. These chips give you immediate benefits when you play them,
like drawing paper cards. These are special abilities that let you cheat, or you can play a devilish offering to reveal one of the boss's cards or take a card out of the discard. Once all the community cards have been revealed and the final betting phase has been completed, players who are still in choose one or two cards to play from their hand. You combine these with the community cards to make your best five card poker hand. The boss reveals their cards and will play whichever is higher, their dealt hand or the default minimum shown on their card.
Each player compares their hand to the boss's hand to figure out if they won or lost. You're not comparing your hand to any of the other players. If you win and had bet souls, you add sold chips to the pot. If you lose or had folded, you remove a certain number of soul chips from the pot and then flip the chips you had bet and suffer the penalties.
Penalties include drawing curse cards and suffering temptation. If two players reach level 10 on the temptation track, everyone loses the game. Yeah, you also lose the game if you can't pay the soul chip penalty for losing against the second to last boss, Mick House, or the final boss, the devil himself.
Everyone wins the game if at least one player wins against the devil himself. And you don't trigger any of the lose conditions. So, obviously that was a pretty quick overview and we didn't go over every single rule, but we'll add some more details as we talk about our opinions.
And we'll start with the components, then move to our critiques, our commendations, and finally our conclusions.
Let's look at the components.
First off, I believe there's only one version of this game. You might be like looking at the B-roll shots that we've been showing the cool stuff. You're like, "That must be the deluxe version." There's no deluxe version. Although, this is a premium quality game. I mean, even the box cover. Woo! Look at that. Um, from everything that you see here, there's a lot of cool stuff that is in this one version of the game. And even everything has a spot inside the box with all the different places for all the things that all the components. And I think it all fits very well. The game mats are really nice in this game. There are two for the community areas where you're going to be laying out the community cards, the boss's cards, keeping track of your temptation. There's also a mat for the extra cards that you're going to be putting out. But then each player has their own mat which really helps with the organization of which chips you have, which ones you're going to be bidding, and it also has the hand rankings listed on them, which is super helpful if you're maybe can't remember is it the flush or the straight, what order they come in. So, I think the mats work really well for this game.
Yeah. So, there's lots of different kinds of chips. Players are going to have chips in front of them that have different actions that they are going to be able to use. You have the soul chips, you have the double offering chips. There's lots of different kinds of chips and they feel good. Um, they feel weighty and they have that sort of plastic like he hefty weight. I don't know if they're plastic.
They have a little clink.
They have a little clink to them. There's also other kinds of tokens. There's the temptation tokens to go up the track. Those are all good. I think they're wooden tokens. And then you also have a die. Um, which I think there's there's only one die in the game, but you you know you're gonna be rolling that normally when you fold. So, hey, [clears throat] don't fold and you don't have to roll the dieice. There you go.
So, the game obviously comes with cards since it's a poker game. And I thought the quality of the cards
was good. The deck cards, the poker cards are easy to distinguish the different suits.
Oh, yeah.
There's favor cards. Those are going to be the ones that give you special ways to cheat. Like maybe you can make a flush with four cards instead of five. Then there's curse cards. You don't want those, but they're going to
hurt you a lot.
Make it more difficult for you to win.
The one nice thing about curse cards, they only last
one round.
And then there are the boss cards. And there's going to be a lot of information on those cards about how they their minimum hand to win. And so, you know, you at least need to beat two pair, although they could do better. And then those boss cards add lots of different rules to the game and change up the round.
Well, let's move on to our critiques. So, you were just talking about those boss cards. There's a lot of different ones,
but I will say small critique.
The game rules tell you the setup enduring setup for your first few games to play with these specific bosses. And it's sort of like a certain order, a certain order. And
they're really difficult.
Like we played those the first few times and we're like, well, let's just try some different bosses or like do different setup just to see what the other ones did. We're like some of these are easier.
No, I know Smirk and Dager likes to make things difficult for co-op games. And I would say they're definitely difficult. Now I believe even um in some like communication that the publisher has said they understand and they offer some other ones that you can use. So
right I think it might have been a BG forum or something where it's like oh well you could try these instead if you don't want it quite as hard.
Usually when you think of understanding a game learning a game you sort of have like beginning level then medium then higher like jump you into the hard stuff. I know because if you don't get rolling on those first couple bosses, it's really hard to do well later in the game.
What else?
So, one thing that we have found that some players have some difficulty with the concept of having three cards, three pocket cards in their hand cuz you're looking at those three cards and you're looking at the community cards and you go, I've got a straight or I've got a flush or I've got three of a kind. Yeah,
you can only use one or two of those cards. And we've had people come down to where they're revealing and they try to use more than that.
And you can't. You don't have what you think you have.
Many times I just like, okay, I'm definitely using these two. I literally put another card down cuz I'm like, I'm not using that card. In the rules, they suggest that you have the two that you're most likely going to play um standing up and then turn the other one sideways. Just do something to kind of visually remind yourself.
There are favorite cards.
There are some favorite cards that let you play three from your hand, which is really nice, but not the norm. So, it's not a critique that they shouldn't have that rule cuz it is nice to have the three cards, but it's just
it's something that will trip people up. And even experienced players
will at some point
think that they have
cuz they're like, "Oh, I've got these two." And I've seen it even before like, "I know I can't use this third card, but I have these two. Let me trade out a card for this one and get rid of this card." Oh, but you're trading out a card you can't use anyways,
right? Can't use three from your hand. The theme could possibly turn some people off. I mean, it's got the talking about hell and the devil and all that. I think it's all used sort of like silly tongue and cheek and even the art style is more that cartoony. I was sort of doing a little bit of research and the artist I believe used what's called there's a rubber hose animation from the the early 1900s with like early animation styles had that like bendy and you sort of see that in the in the um illustration style of this game and I think it it actually worked pretty well with what's going on.
Yeah. I I wondered when it first came out like, "Oh, I don't know about this." But
I also usually don't dive into themes too much.
Sure.
So, my last critique, and this is a feature of the game, so it's not something that I think should change in the game, but just something to be aware of depending on your preferred play style. This is poker. It has cards, lots of different types of cards. So, there is going to be randomness in this game.
It's [clears throat] not something that you can long-term strategize and know that your plan is going to come to fruition.
Especially since it's a co-op game, you think, "Oh, what are we all going to do in order to do this?" But sometimes the best the best part of a round could [clears throat] be to drop out,
right? There's
And that feels bad, I think.
Right. Or you're like, I'm gonna get this favorite card. Some of the favorite cards are better than others or or are situational. You could end up with two of the same favorite card and they neither one help you. Or you could get curse cards that really mess up your strategy
or your Yeah, cuz your hand it is random and it could be like I got all these certain cards. Maybe it's diamonds and it's like you can't use diamonds this way,
right? Some of the curses say you can't use a certain suit in your hand or you can't fold, right?
Um, so
I enjoy the being able to
adapt and see if it can happen, but
I could see where it may frustrate some players who are like, I have the good odds here. And then the boss actually has a flush that you weren't expecting and that makes your team lose live on camera. But so
definitely watch the playthrough cuz we did that a few months ago.
So it's just, you know, there's going to be some randomness. There are going to be hands that you think that you have everything you need to win and then they don't or ones where you think that there's no chance you could win and then you know that cheating really helps you out.
Well, let's move on to our likes in our commendations. There is a lot of variability in this game and let's let me just talk about the bosses. There are a bunch of bosses. Now, I will say there's two different difficulty levels. So part of this deck are the regular bosses. The other part is the hellfire bosses, which is basically the same boss but just more difficult. But there's just a ton of different bosses that you can do and make just make the game the gameplay itself different. There's even one that's based off of other casino games. The, you know, blackjacket and 21, the Reddit Jack boss. Um, if you can hit 21 with the cards that are in front of you and it is face up cards in this, so it's even getting
you can see
see other people's cards which is making the whole round a little bit different. But you can if you can hit 21, you get a soul. So it's just making the game itself fresh every time you play, [clears throat] especially if you're playing with the different bosses,
right? And I believe you play with four of the minions each game and then Nick Hos and then there's like six or eight different devil cards so you don't know which one you're going to face at the end of each round. So yeah, I agree Kevin. I like [clears throat] the variability. I also really like the cheating that you do in the game, which is authorized cheating, I guess, because it's the favor cards. You know, you can make a straight with four cards instead of five. You can play three cards from your hand. Maybe you're looking through the deck for a specific card. There's lots and lots of things that these favor cards do. You can help someone who is going to suffer a lot of penalties.
Maybe they don't have to suffer them that round.
Yep.
So, those cards are fun to play. And also the chips that you have in front of you, especially that red chip that lets you do the devilish offerings. Those are some pretty powerful things that you can do with taking a card from the discard pile because when people fold or when you do the burn card, it's going face up in a discard pile. So you can see which cards are not in the deck, which ones aren't in other people's hands. And one player could be like, I really need a card from the discard pile. play their devilish offering and be able to get that out. So, I think all of those aspects of manipulating your hand and trying to help other people is really fun.
Also, helping people with the chips that you have, then maybe managing temptation because someone's going up the track too fast. Now, we haven't really mentioned the track itself, but there's these little fire levels that we we mentioned that if you get too many people up at the top, then you're going to automatically lose. But if someone passes like where the five is, you can't backtrack. So you're like, "Oh, this person's about to pass. Let's let's heal them." So there's a lot of strategy like, "Let's let's help this person." Or sometimes you're helping yourself.
Totally. Okay. So there's that strategy going on as well.
And the chip that lets you reveal two of the cards from your hand, that can be helpful so people know, oh, they have a strong hand or maybe they're revealing cards that they don't want. because there's another chip that lets you swap cards with another player. So, you can't tell people what's in your hand, but there are ways to show people what you have and maybe figure out how to get cards to different people.
So, I know in the critiques I said there's a lot of randomness, but there's also a lot of strategy,
lot of ways around. One thing that I don't normally like about poker is the bluffing aspect because I do not have a good poker face. So, I really enjoy that this game is cooperative and you're not trying to bluff. You're trying to help people. You're trying to deduce what they have. You're trying to be helpful and help as many people beat that boss as they can. So, I enjoyed the cooperative nonbluffing aspect of this game.
Let's move on to our conclusions. [snorts] Poker style games are a hit right now. I mean, even outside of the board game space, you have video games and streaming games like Bolatro, which are just taking off the storm. So, there's a lot of games out there that are using that poker style mechanic, and I think Hell of a Deal uses it really well. I do wish that it played more players. So, that's my one wish. I do enjoy the game. I just wish I'm like, "Oh, three three players is fine." I would not play this with lower, but I think I would play it higher.
Okay. Yeah, it it would be interesting if the game length would extend with more players. I think it would be really hard. They'd have to adjust how many souls and things, I think.
Yeah. I just the gameplay I would wish it was more than four.
Okay. Yeah. I from a poker standpoint,
I like Ace of Spades at one to two players.
Oh, yeah. Um, hell of a deal at three or four players.
I three I don't even know if I play this at three.
Okay.
But four players good.
Um, and then we've gotten the gang deluxe this year. And so six up that
we just played that the other night with seven, right?
Mhm. It worked really well. So I've liked all of those poker style games. Again, I think they each fit at a different player.
So maybe this is the three or four player count for you.
Yes, I would say that. I would not play the gang at three or four.
No, no. I I'd like the six and up for the gang. Um, so I think I mentioned earlier that there's
Tell us more.
Yes. Well, I'm getting there. So, you know, there are certain things about poker I like, certain things I don't. And for me, Hell of a Deal removes things that I don't like, like the bluffing aspect and the figuring out how much to bet. Like, am I raising? Am I calling? and I'm matching all of that stressful stuff about poker. It's not in there because it's cooperative.
This game adds things that I really like in games. So, the cooperative nature of trying to get everyone to win, the strategizing of, you know, who's taking which chips. I like that aspect. The different ways to cheat so you can hit those big hands and have those big moments of, "Yay, we did it." Um, so I like all of those things about Hell of a Deal, which is why for me, I'm pretty sure that I'm probably putting it into my top 10 games of this year because I've just really enjoyed playing it and it has a lot of elements that I like in the game.
Probably won't hit my top 10 this year, but I have got other games in my top 10. So,
okay. Yeah, we don't always have to have the same top 10, even though we play most of our games together. Well, if you've played a poker style game, um, board game, let us know what those are. Have you played Hell of a Deal? We'd love to hear your thoughts, what you found enjoyable or found challenging about the game, let me know down in the comments. We'd love to hear from you. It helps us to hear what our fans like or not like about games. And please like this video. It'll help the channel out and help this video get out to more eyes. And of course, subscribe to Tant Mouse. Thanks so much for watching.