Wyatt Earp Board Game
Written by Cearbhail on April 18th, 2011Wyatt Earp surprised me a lot when I played it. It’s a simple card game like tichu online in which players are sheriffs fighting to see who gets the most money by arresting notorious criminals. Instead of healthy cooperation in name of peace and public safety, we are a selfish bunch who would rather see the criminal rob banks and shoot innocent people rather than have him being taken down by a fellow peacekeeper. Nice.
What the board game is, with all the frills removed, is a simple rummy variant. Each bad guy would be a suit (the game thus has seven suits) and players try to form sets of . Every time a player significantly contributes to the presence of the suit (ok, ok, bad guy) in the game, more money is added to the reward, making it more worth fighting for.
This board game’s balance is quite well tuned: you need 3 cards to be able to start a suit (or a search for the bad guy), but that only adds up to 6, and a reward is only paid if the total strength of the search is 8 or more. So an element of cooperation among adversaries can occur during this board game, specially considering that other people’s contributions can add up to the final pot (just make sure you’re the one with the most power in the search in the end and not let that reward slip your hands…). There’s even a clever mechanism where a runaway leader in a dispute can end up taking all the money, without having to split it with anyone.
Along with the normal cards, this board game also has a bunch of special cards, called “sheriff” cards. Most of them are generic upgrades to search parties, giving you some flexibility in your disputes against other players. The problem is, you can only play one of these cards per turn, so sometimes you can end up being “stuck” with a bunch of them. The round ends (and midgame scores are added) when a player finishes his turn with no cards in his hand, but unlike many other games this is far from defining the winner of that round: it’s just a small advantage that others weren’t able to react to his last couple of plays. More than once I’ve seen a player be able to end the turn and not do so because it would’ve been bad for him.
The appeal of Wyatt Earp is somewhat undescribable. I’m usually not a fan of light board games (I play games to torture my brain, as I frequently say) and even so the game’s mechanisms do not seem particularly brilliant when coldly analysed (as I am prone to do with the games I play). I am not attacked by super-difficult decisions or face interesting strategic dilemmas during a match. Most of the time when I lose I’m forced to conclude that it was mostly due to bad luck of the draw, instead of any poor decisions that I’ve made. Skill seems like a matter of mere familiarity with the rules, instead of deep knowledge of how the mechanisms interact together, or guessing how your opponents will react. You mostly do what you can, given the cards that you were given.
But still, while in most other board games this would mean that I would rather not play (much less own, like I do), for some reason I really dig this game. It’s fun. There’s really nothing much to say about it. Other players that have liked it expressed it similarly: I don’t know, I just dig it. “Really neat” is a common expression used to describe it by those who like it. Other board gamers in our group that didn’t like it just don’t get it. But, honestly, neither do we, really.
I mean, it even breaks one of my game-enjoyment axioms. Theme to me tends to be somewhat irrelevant: I usually focus on the strategy and the mechanisms. I usually say that theme is like a food’s appearance: nice if it’s good and attractive, but it’s far from being really important. In Wyatt Earp’s case, I actually get into the theme, we sort of narrate among ourselves the little events that occur during the game “Oh, I heard that Billy the Kidd robbed the bank… let’s see if it’s true… nope, he’s a damn coward!”, and so on.
This is not the cold calculating game of Mü, or the I-dare-you laughter-filled matches of Tichu, or even the masochistic endeavor that is Sticheln. It’s not completely random and filled with tension, like 6 Nimmt (or Category 5, whatever). It’s just a relaxing game of rummy, with a cute theme implementation and some nice art.
The art is nice, but it’s still irritating to deal with these super-small cards. Not only are a pain to hold and fan out, but they’re also difficult to find sleeves for. Still, all the cards are pretty clear in what they do and the drawings look nice. The cardboard money is fine and the posters for the criminals look great (they even have a printed-wood back that’s almost so nice it makes you want to leave the posters face-down). The box is a little too big for the components, but not ridiculously so
Overall, I give Wyatt Earp a 7.5/10. I recommend it specially for 3 players, since with four things can get a little too busy with the players getting in each others’ way. A match takes only about half an hour, and pretty much anyone can play (the official age estimate of 12+ is a quite over the top, perhaps due to the criminal theme; my guess would be 8+), given the simple board game rules. It only takes about one hand for the newbie to understand what’s going on, and it’s quite possible to catch up if you fall behind. I’ve played this around ten times already, and even though it’s not something I’d choose every week or so, cardgames tend to be quite replayable, given the variety of the card draw.
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