First time with David & Goliath

This weekend I played my first game of David & Goliath.

It's a simple card game in principal but it kind of evolves during play. You become aware of techniques and possible stratergies thru play, that you dont immediately see before starting.

The game has a number of suits. A suit is just the cards border color. Red, Blue, green, Yellow etc. Each suit comes with denominations of 1 - 18. Depending on the number of players ( minimum 3 ) you discard a number of these before playing ans thay are not used at all. For instance in the four player game I played you only used cards numbered 1 thru 12.

Play is simplicity itself. Shuffle the cards and deal then evenly to the the players

With each hand of cards a new player takes a turn as being the starting player. The starting player plays a card from their hand onto the table face up. Then going clockwise every other player must play a card of the same suit ( color ). If a player cant play suit, they may play any card from their hand.

Once every player has played one card you determin who gets what cards.

The player who played the lowest denomination takes the highest card played and puts it in his score pile. The player who played Highest, gets the remaining cards for their score pile.

Then you move onto the next hand. You dont replenish your hand of cards, so on each subsequent hand you have less choice as your cards deplete.

When you've played out all of your cards, that the end of the round and you score the cards you've collected. This scoring is what is really interesting. You score each suit seperately. Imagine you had collected Blue 10 and Blue 8, this would score 18. However if you had more than two cards in Blue. you only score 1 point for each.

So as you may gather the best way to score high, is to only collect 2 high value cards from each suit. This seems straight forward, but it's complicated by the other players. All of the cards collected for scoring have to be kept face up so other players can play cards to either improve their own score, or to spoil yours!

This is a good light game. It's fun for the family. My wife doesn't generally enjoying playing games, but this one even struck her as simple and good fun.