Card Caper by University Games

We found another interesting hybrid card game at the same thrift shop as last post, just 6 weeks later.  By "hybrid", I mean it combines a regular deck of cards with some other major game mechanic.  In this case, Card Caper by University Games is simply a game of trying to guess your opponent's card.  It starts with each player choosing a secret card, and the rest of the cards are dealt out to all players.  Then, each player puts one card from their hand under each section of their side of the board, so you will end up playing a card of a different suit, a card that's higher than your card, a card that's lower than your card, and a card with a different value.

Once set up, you takes turns rolling a die and moving a piece around the circular board, which tells you what action you can take on your turn.  If the board says "higher card", you have to play another card in your "higher card" area, and so on.  If the board says "Guess", you get to guess an opponent's card.  "Ask and Guess" means you can ask a player to play a card in one of their four slots and then you get to guess their card.

That's all fairly simple, and we played the first round by just making wild guesses.  But it turns out there are a lot more clues on those face-up cards than we realized at first.  You want to give as few hints as possible with those first four cards you show.  There's not much about different suit or different card between one card or another, but the high and low cards really help reduce the number of possible cards you might have, so after two rounds we found ourselves always starting an A for our lower card and K for higher card, which is the least helpful pair of clues available.  But after playing a few more of those low or high cards, the game naturally starts to narrow down the choices.

A neat twist is that if you make a guess and fail, some player has to find the card your guessed and put it face up on top of their hidden card, so the whole history of guesses gets encoded in the layout.

Aside from the game board, the other hybrid element is that it comes with a score sheet where you can check off all the cards played and which guesses you have made.  It was trying to be a hybrid with the kind of logic matrix puzzles we sometimes enjoy playing on our phones.  We found it confusing at first, but after a few rounds, the score card made it too easy, as far as a two player game is concerned.  When I did finally mark off all the visible cards, then the "not spades" would cross off a whole column and "not a 7" would cross off the rows of 7s, I would even put a little tick mark for the above and below cards, and the hidden card had to be one of the not-crossed-off cards between those tick marks.  But we didn't need to do that anyway.

Anne had begun sorting her cards, so she could see right away how many 3s or 5s were left in play.  

Note that having a secret card that's at the low or high end of the spectrum is a real handicap.

Here, I had a king as my secret card, so I couldn't play a higher card at all, which made it obvious that I had a king.  And Anne guessed it on the very first guess because she had two kings showing and the third king was in her hand.

Scoring is a bit odd and we didn't bother with it.  Technically, when you guess a player's secret card you score one point for all the cards in their secret card pile, so one for the secret card and one for each failed guess on top of it ... while the player whose card was NOT guessed scores 5.  We just had fun playing and whoever guessed the other's card felt like the winner to us. 

It would probably feel very different with more players, where the score card would matter because we could see which cards each player had played -- if they played a card it couldn't be their hidden card.

We didn't like the scoring sheets, and you would end up using one sheet PER ROUND (although I wrote very lightly and could erase my marks each time), so it seemed wasteful.

We agreed that this one was interesting and fun and worth keeping around for a while.