Rattlesnake Review: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Transcript
Hey everybody, I'm Tom Vassal.
I'm Mike Delisio.
Today we're taking a look at Rattlesnake, designed by Mark Michael Hardacker. Which sounds like he was in this time frame of cowboys.
Yeah, kind of does. I'm Michael Hardacker and I'm here to clean up this town.
Fastest gun in the west. That's what this is. This is a two-player cowboy shoot-'em-up card game. And the box says 15 minutes and it is not lying.
Mhm, very much.
This is a deck builder sort of. Yeah, ish. Yeah. Yeah, well, let me show you how it plays. In this game, each player has four hit cards. If you lose all four of your hit cards, you lose the game. You also have identical decks of cards that are numbered from one to five, each of these cards having a special ability on it. So, at the beginning of each round, players are going to draw five cards in their hand. It doesn't matter whose turn it is. So, whoever's turn it is will have the gun there, the attacker. But both players draw up to five cards. Then the attacker has two options and they can do this in any order. They can buy one of these cards in the middle. To buy a card in the middle, you simply discard any two of your cards. You buy the card that you want. This card will come into your hand. And then that card is replaced. You can only do that once per turn. Sometimes when a card is replaced, it will be an event card. So, here's an event card that comes out.
That event card, this one says draw one more card each turn. So, now we're drawing six. And that will stay in play for the rest of the game and it will take up the spot of the available cards for people to buy. There's this event card here, which in a successful attack does an extra hit, is always in the game. Now, when your deck runs out of cards, you'll shuffle it and put these cards back in it. And if you're ever hit, your hit card goes into your deck. This can be used to buy a card if you want to. Um but that's what how how the game is going to work. Also, every card has a special ability. This says, "Discard your hand, draw three." I can play this on anyone's turn, whether I'm attacker or defender. But when you play a card for special ability, it goes to the graveyard. It is no longer part of your deck. Discard my hand, so this would go to discard, and then draw three.
And you can play as many cards as you want, but you know, the more cards you play, the smaller your deck is going to get. The other thing you can do on your turn is attack. When the attacker attacks, they play at least one card, but they can play as many cards as they want. They can play any cards they want as a bluff if they're in their hand. The defender can play as many cards as they want, but they don't have to play any. You then will reveal them. So here's a 4 4 5 and a 1 2 3. You're going to play either a run of cards, 1 2 3, or cards of the same. So here we have two 4s against a 1 2 3. When this happens, there are more cards here, three to two, cuz the five doesn't count. So this side is winning. If, for example, I played a card that allows me to modify a card by one, and there are cards that let you do that. So maybe on my turn, I will play a card that changes this five to a four.
And when now I have So I play this distract card. Plus or minus one on any card in play. I now have three 4s. So I have three to their three. When that's a tie, then the three of a kind would beat three in a row. You could also just play one card, four versus one, and one wins. Uh there At that point, I'm winning. So we keep going back and forth until somebody wins. If the defender wins, nothing happens. All cards are discarded, you keep going. If the attacker wins, all cards are discarded, but the defender must take a wound. Regardless what happens, and remember you don't know it's attack on your turn, the next player becomes the attacker, and we keep going back and forth until eventually someone loses all their hits, and then the other player wins.
Before we talk about the game, I want to give a big shout out to Roland McDonald, who did fantastic art in this. It really is just good art.
It really is, and I think maybe the game he's most known for is Western Legends in the same kind of time period, right? Yeah, you need a Western game uh artistically done, he would be the person. This is not a big game at all. No.
This is a small game where you each have an identical set of cards, and then a small little deck of cards that you were adding to your deck. There are five different cards for each number, and then five other different cards that you can throw in. And it works so well. It really does. It's such a smooth game. The key rule, which we figured out cuz we played it wrong the first time, was when you play an action card, that card is gone forever. Yes. And that it's kind of a you have a weird thing with that. You At first you're like, well, I don't want to get rid of these cuz I want to lose the cards. And then after a while you're like, I need to play as many of these as I can. Absolutely. Then you come back and be like, wait, I'm playing too many, I'm losing the cards I need. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's almost like hand management is built into the game, you know what I mean? Um and you were talking earlier about how it's not a big game. I feel like if this was released 10 12 years ago, you would almost be calling it one of those micro games that were so popular at the time. It almost has that feel. Yeah, it says there's 65 cards, so it's a deck of cards, but man, it's it's one of those games when we're finished I was like, I don't know that this needs anything else. It has the five different events,
Yeah. of which or six different events you're only going to see five in a game. And they feel good. There's 10 cards. They feel good. You You also know all the cards. This This game comes with these reference cards which it should. Yes.
And yet I never look at them because I know exactly the card is so obvious as what to do. Yeah, especially after the first game. I mean, what what I think it pulls off a neat trick of is kind of what you're saying is that it's able to kind of feel almost like a micro game but there's 60 some cards. It's because you're not necessarily accounting for all of those cards at any given time, right? You've got the basic cards. You're going to figure that out. You're going to kind of internalize those very quickly and then the other cards are kind of variations on some of those themes. So, it's a really cleverly designed game. And the game is designed to continue to move. The last event card's always a hit does two damage. I don't know if I played a game yet where where that's come into play. You're usually shooting someone out.
There's an event that says if you the defense wins, they do a hit which doesn't normally happen. Actually speeds the game up. The only event that slows the game down is when it says draw one less card. Right, sure. Um but man, it just it's a it's a nice back and forth. It allows a little bit of bluffing. I could be like, I'm attacking you with four cards. You're like, well,
why should I waste any cards defending? Mhm. But do you really have that? And then you could always play the card that says discard everything and now flip the top card of the pile. Yeah. Which sounds lucky but that can still be mitigated beyond that. It can. But that is my favorite card in the game.
I just I don't know there's something about cuz then it almost really feels like a duel, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to draw the top card. Yeah. I can't really go much more into talk about this other than I will say that the two of us are reviewing this but almost everyone here has played it. And it is I can't speak for Mike but everyone else has has liked it a lot. Yeah, I'm giving this an 8.5. I think this is a fantastic fast two-player game. This is if you're traveling with somebody, this would be a great game to bring with you that you can play in a very small space. I think you could play this on a plane almost.
Yeah, I think you could.
You could play this in a very little tables. This is an In between this game is just a great filler two-player game that I can teach and have running and it doesn't feel like it's going to get old
anytime quickly. Yeah, and and I'm not much lower than you. I'm at an eight. And for me actually that's pretty high praise for this type of game cuz this is a type of game direct head-to-head cards with powers. I don't tend to love those games. Quite honestly, those usually just are kind of like a collectible card Almost, right? This one works for me very well. This is one that I would play at any time. It's so fast. Um, you know, you can build a little bit of a meta when you say play the same person three, four, five games in a row, but you don't need that for the game to be good. You know, it's just it's another little thing you can add to it. So, really solid card game. Well, there you go, folks. That is Rattlesnake. I'm Tom. I'm Mike. We'll see you. Shouldn't have worn a cowboy hat for this. I don't know. I know.
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