Wednesday, January 07, 2015

#52: Viva Pamplona! (Mark's 100 - 2014)

Viva Pamplona

Mark's Ranking
  • 2014: 52nd
  • 2012: 53rd
  • 2010: 39th
  • 2005: 56th
  • appeared on all four lists
  • rank: 2597
  • rating: 6.36
Print Status
  • very OOP
Why It's On The List
  • It's a great theme (the running of the bulls) with great art and even better game play... you must have courage to win - and the willingness to shove your opposition to the ground.
Tips & Tricks:
    • The tempo of the game can vary wildly - depending on how the Toro cards appear. That's not a bug... it's a feature - part of what makes the game so charming..
    Extras
    • I was pleasantly surprised how well this game works with 3-4 players... of course, it's a "more the merrier" game that is an absolute joy with the full complement of six people around the table.
    • This is from the same gaming design family as Viva Topo and Midnight Party. (It's a family I'm fond of...)
    • I've often wondered about how you can lose courage points when someone else shoves you (and worse yet, they get them!), but it's still fun.

    3 comments:

    Gamesnight said...
    This comment has been removed by the author.
    Gamesnight said...

    I had a typo and I wanted to corrected it. Then I found that editing wasn't an option and deleting was.

    My group enjoys this game quite a lot. We do "set the deck up" when we play. The way we do this is we pull out all of the Toro cards out and shuffle the non-Toro cards. Pull one non-Toro card and set it aside. Devide the remaining non-Toro cards into three even stacks. Add two Toro cards to each stack and shuffle them into that stack. Make the game deck by stacking the three stack and then placing the single non-Toro card that you had set aside on the very top.

    It still ends up feeling random, but its less random than just shuffling the all the cards together. You can get some knowns using this system, but only if the Toro cards end up at the bottom of a stack and you have card-counter playing in the game.

    Mark (aka pastor guy) said...

    I understand why you would choose to do that - but I think that part of the charm of the game is the utter randomness of Toro's behavior.