Guillotine

Sometimes a simple game is all you need for a good time. The rules of Guillotine are quite basic. You can learn the game rules or show them to someone else in a few moments. This helps make Guillotine a very approachable game, but what makes it keep getting played is just how fun it is.

You are an executioner, You cut off heads, and being good at your job is important. Collect better heads at the end of three days, and you can be the best darn executioner in the kingdom. Well…until the next game anyway.

The game has a line of cards. They are the heads you are trying to acquire for points. The point of the game is to move the line around so the cards you take are better than the cards your opponents take. You always take the head on the right side of the line, but cards allow you to move the order of this line. Some of the heads give extra bonuses, some are just straight up points, and some are going to cost you points and make you look like an executioner in training which is quite embarrassing indeed.

There is a lot of variation in the types of cards you can play. Everything from changing the way certain heads contribute points to removing all the heads and getting an entire new line of victims. For a simple game, you can have a good amount of strategy. You can also play this game as a lightning fast point collecting game. Both are fun and both are available with this game quite easily.

The cards are well illustrated, they are humorous, and the game flows very well and very quick. The theme may be of beheading, but it is with a tongue in cheek approach. This is Saturday morning cartoons executions we are talking about here.

Pro:
-Very affordable
-Easy to learn
-Enough cards to keep things fresh and new

Cons:
-Even though there is a good mix of card abilities, there could have easily been more.
-The game can go by faster than you might hope for. Play another game, or make house rules to lengthen the game, otherwise it goes by pretty fast.

Conclusion:
Guillotine is fun. Simple as that. It’s not complex, but it doesn’t set out to be. There are some interesting strategies with the cards, but those are limited as well. As long as your not dead set against simple games, it’s hard not to have fun with this. It’s very affordable and bound to be played again and again.

Guillotine is a solid casual card game for 2-5 players. Thematically : each player is an executioner during the French revolution, taking the heads of nobles over the course of 3 days. The nobles executed are worth points depending on the crowd’s reactions, so Marie Antoinette scores 5 points, while executing an Innocent Victim is -1 point.

The game is full of dark humor, in both content and images, so while easy to teach, it is meant for a more teen-adult group looking for light, casual play. This is one of my small box games i bring on vacation with about 6 others, compact and easy to set up. It contains: 1 deck of Nobles, 1 deck of Action Cards, and a card board standee of a Guillotine to mark the front of the line.

The Noble Deck consists of various characters to be executed, each with different point values and a colored “suit” : Purple (Aristocracy), Blue (Church), Green (Bureaucracy), Red (Military), Gray (which are worth negative points often having the sympathies of the people). Some Nobles may have an additional effect listed on the card.

Meanwhile, Action Cards mostly consist of ways to manipulate the order of the line, but also have ways to effect other players and score bonus points.

Each day (round) 12 cards are laid out with the guillotine set up at one end. Each player in turn does the following:
1) Play an Action Card from your hand (this is optional)
2) Take the first Noble in line (this must be done, only effected by the current action card in play)
3) Draw an Action Card (whether or not you played one, there’s no hand limit)

Once all Nobles in line are executed, a new day begins and another 12 are lined up. There are 3 days total, and the player with the most points wins.

Game play is fast, while the cards are random, they also add variance in play making it easy to play a couple of games back to back with out repetition. While the theme may not appeal to all, it works well tying the characters and actions together well thematically. Set up and rules are easy, but a con is that it does require a bit of space to late out the 12 cards each round and for each player to have their Nobles/points out in front of them.

This is a standard filler and travel game in our house.

“Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; – the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!” – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Ahh, Guillotine, the family game that features excellent art very similar to Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, easy to learn game play and a subject matter that is rather gruesome if you stop to think about it, and yet not really much different than playing games like Modern Warfare, Call of Duty or any other game that borrows from the real world’s darker side. If black comedy had a card game, this would be it!

Setting aside the subject matter for a minute, the game is a really fun diversion. I carry a deck around in my card/gaming bag since it plays quickly, is easy to learn and is fun. What’s not to like about fulfilling those three criteria? 🙂

The setup is that you’re knee deep in the French Revolution, possibly even the Reign of Terror all things considered. Nobles, soldiers, clergy, royalty and martyrs are lined up as if it was Studio 54 circa 1977. The difference here is, this is the one line none of them wants to be on! Each “day” (ie, a game round) 12 new figures are lined up and one by one they march towards the National Razor to lose their heads. It’s your job to collect those heads over a “3 day span” for points! The more powerful the figure, the more points their head is worth! Louie XVI and Marie Antoinette are both valued the highest, but you can rack up a bunch of points with others by playing cards from your hand that give bonuses.

The art for the game is fantastic, especially if you’re into animation style art work. The art is so close to Beauty and the Beast that you could seamlessly slip The Beast, Belle and Gaston in and they could easily be believed to be part of the game. The cast of characters ranges from actual figures such as King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Robespierre to colorful roles and archetypes like the **** Boy and the Lady In Waiting.

As for the game play, players play cards from hand like “Rain Delay”, “Clerical Error”, “Bribed Guards”, etc to manipulate the execution line so that the valuable heads will arrive at the headsman when it’s their turn. After the 3rd day, all players tally their point totals and the one with the highest total wins the game. The game plays quickly and is a great diversionary game to play in between other longer games, play in hotel rooms, on road trips and on family game nights.

This is a fun, quick game that is easy to learn and is easy to travel with. I highly recommend this game for your game bag/backpack/glove compartment! Now go grab an extra wheel barrel and start collecting!

oh and… cake please. 😉

Gaming experiences have become more complicated in recent years, and a good number of games require a fair amount of startup time and cleanup time besides the actual time required to play the game itself. It’s no wonder that many games span well past an hour to play, which makes getting together for a gaming night with friends a real investment into the evening. But the thing about complicated games is that they give a sense of depth and feel to them; the good ones can become really involved, to a point where a game feels less like a game and more like an experience.

The problem with the long games, however, is that they can become exhausting, and when a group is pressed for time, they can usually only plan one or two games a night. This is where games like Guillotine really shine; a game of Guillotine can be very quick in comparison to other games, and works well as a filler or as a stand-alone game to play with friends.

So what is Guillotine about? Well, in a nutshell, it is the days of Marie Antoinette, and the populace is in an uproar. They have had enough, and the peasants are calling for blood…specifically, the nobles’ blood. And anyone else who was unfortunate enough to get caught in the mob’s path. The game is set over a course of three days, in which players will attempt to collect the most points by collecting nobles into their score pile (in reality, those nobles are getting beheaded by the executioner who waits at the chopping block for the next victim, but if you want to avoid the grim setting, one can just rephrase things to say that you’re saving the nobles instead).

During the days in which the game is set, a line of cards representing nobles is set out in front of a cardboard executioner (I believe 12 nobles in all for each day). The noble at the head of the line will be the first to be executed, followed by the noble behind him or her, and so on, and so forth, until all the nobles have been executed. Each noble has an associated point value that goes along with it, ranging from 5 at the high end, to -3 at the low end (Hero of the People…the mob doesn’t want to see him executed, but oh well). During each player’s turn, that player MUST collect a noble from the line, almost always from the front of the line. Of course, some nobles are more desirable than others, and no one wants to take that -3 hit to their score. To assist the players in maneuvering the line to the chopping block in a way that favors them, players make use of the action cards.

Each player receives 5 action cards at the start of the game, and during each of their turns, that player may elect to play one action card from their hand. There are many different types of action cards; most affect the order of nobles in some way, like moving a noble back two spaces in line, or rearranging the first 5 nobles in line randomly. Others affect point scoring, like an action card that gives one additional point for each red noble you have in your scoring pile at the end of the game. Still others can attack other players, like swapping action hands, or stealing a noble from their score pile. An effectively played action card can sometimes swing a game drastically; Double Feature, for instance, allows you to collect two nobles from the front of the line instead of one.

The nobles themselves are not simply just point values; they also sometimes have special abilities themselves. The Master Spy moves to the end of the line every time an action card is played, which usually ensures that he will be the last noble to be collected during a given day. The Clown gives a -1 to a point value, but the person who collects it can assign the Clown to someone else, making it an attack card. And then there are the Palace Guards, which value goes up for each one you have in your score pile. 1 Palace Guard = 1 point, 2 Palace Guards = 4 points (2 x 2 points each), 3 Palace Guards = 9 points (3 x 3 points each), and so on.

At the end of three days, all players total up their score piles and any score modifier cards that they have, and come up with a final score; the player with the highest score is the winner. Really, there’s not much more to the game than that. Your average game of Guillotine from start to finish is roughly about a half-hour with 4 players, with slight time modifications with greater or lower numbers of players. The game’s learning curve is such that anyone can grasp how to play the game just by watching it, and the game itself requires minimal explanation and setup. The art of the game is whimsical and amusing, which makes playing the game entertaining rather than macabre. In its own element, Guillotine quickly becomes the go-to game to just pick up and play, and for this reason, I highly recommend picking it up.

As has been said elsewhere, the theme for Guillotine is pretty grim, being based on the near-industrial scale slaughter of nobles (and anyone else inconveniently in the way of the regime) during the French Reign of Terror. This game makes light of the situation in a way not unlike the film Carry On Don’t Lose Your Head (though not as full of dire puns), and I rather like it. I won’t, however, be playing this with my daughter in the near future.

The mechanics are simple: line up a load of noble cards (which all have nicely executed comic-style artwork), then each player has the chance to play an action card, then executes the noble at the front of the queue. You score points for nobles you execute; some have negative scores, and some have special effects like preventing you playing an action card or being scored in a non-standard way. Action cards mostly allow you to make changes to the order of the queue, but some provide bonus or penalty scores or have more exotic effects like swapping hands with another player.

This isn’t a game to worry too much about strategy, but there are some things to look out for and the possibility of some fairly clever plays to improve your lot. I’d class this as a lightweight filler game that is not completely trivial.

All in all I really enjoy Guillotine. You’ll have to make your own mind up about the theme, but the mechanics fit the theme well and make for a fun, fast-moving game.

Disclaimer, the title is not original, in fact, that is the games tagline. I’m not very creative.

I gave this game a 10/10 and it is merited. Mind you, I am a little biased as this was the first ‘more advanced’ game that I fell in love with.

4/5 Replay Value: From my experience, Guillotine appeals to most people, and can be played numerous times (maybe a little redundant if played time-after-time). The randomness in the line-up makes each game unique, and the cards in your hand will uniquely influence the line. As a result, game-to-game strategy should vary slightly.

4/5 Components: Card are cards, so not much can be said there, but the pop-up executioner is a nice touch. Also, the art direction of the characters is nice and charicaturized, which is important since the game is a little morbid. Surprisingly, some of the cards have important historical accuracy (like Robespierre’s special ability).

4/5 Easy to Learn: Guillotine is simple enough to teach quickly, to most any gamer as well as any age group (as long as they’re comfortable beheading numerous people)

Guillotine is a super fun game, but it might get a little redundant after a while. If you do manage to add it to your game library, I’m sure you’ll be putting it to use every now and again. It deserves a spot on your shelves, and you might even get a fun history lesson in the process!

Looking at its mechanics Guillotine is quite an interesting game. I could describe it as a “Queue management game”. There are two decks there. The first contains cards that form the queue on the table. Basically players take cards from this deck one after another in sequence. These cards bring victory points. The cards from second deck are kept in players’ hands. The players may use them to alter the order of the queue to get themselves the most valuable cards from there leaving the less valuable ones (including ones with penalties) to the opponents.

The game is fast and easy. It may be a good filler and a good game for younger players. Playing it could be really interesting and funny but…

The theme chosen for the game is – in my opinion – unacceptable. Players are executioners. Yuck. More! Not only plain executioners but ones during the French revolution, during times when to be sentenced to death it was often enough to be born as a noble. The executions were commonly just justified murders that time. Yeah, it was long time ago. But it does not change much. If we accept such a theme for a game next generation could accept as normal, let’s say, a game about genocide management in a Nazi German concentration camp during the second World War (there is one, really).

Summing up: the nice mechanics of this game should be re-implemented with a more proper theme. In its current form I recommend not to play it, and most of all not showing it to any children.

This is a great game to break the ice and start the evening. It’s very easy for newcomers to learn in just a few minutes. It involves just enough strategy to warm up your think muscles.

I find myself continually looking at the art, which is extremely well done. The different expressions of the nobles are hilarious.

I’ve seen some harsh reviews of the theme, but there’s no blood or gore depicted on any of the cards. Quite benign actually.

We never get tired of this one as a filler game.

If you like games that are fun and quick, this is a great example of both. The theme of the game is a bit odd, especially if you have small children, but otherwise it’s very fun.