Annaliese Vorhees
The board game Skull combines simple mechanics, colorful artwork, and a healthy dose of tense social deduction to create a game that could be easily played in any party setting in less than 45 minutes. Players start out with four tiles and a place mat of matching design (choosing my colors was one of the highlights of the game, to be honest). Three of the tiles have flowers on them, and one has a skull. The place mats have one side with a flower on it, and one side with a skull. The game begins with the place mat flower side up. To set up, the place mats are laid out next to each other in the center of the table, and the tiles make up the player’s “hand” and are not visible to the other players. On their first turn, each player lays one tile down onto their place mat, deciding privately whether to play a flower or a skull. Players take turns laying down one more of their tiles until someone makes a bet – then, the turns become about passing or raising the bet. The bet consists of a number of tiles, indicating how many tiles the player thinks they can turn over (including all of their own tiles in play) without revealing a skull. Once all players have passed and a highest bidder has been determined, that player begins by flipping over their own tiles, then their opponents, until they reach the number of tiles that they wagered. If they succeed without revealing a skull, they win the round and flip their place mat to keep track. If they fail, they lose the round and the player whose skull tricked them removes one card from the losing player’s hand. The game ends when a player has won two rounds, or all of the other players have lost all of their cards.
Skull initially comes across as being very similar to poker. Players know what cards they have played, but not what others are hiding. Players go around the circle placing increasingly high bets that they know what’s going on around the table. The only real mechanics, aside from placing tiles in the pile, are bluffing and betting. It does also share some of its charm with poker. In my experience playing Skull, there was intrigue to be found in reading the faces of the other players, or in shaking their confidence with misdirections or by challenging their wagers. The simplicity of the game’s mechanics made it easy to think through the strategy in multiple ways, weighing risk, reward, and probability in a way that each move felt very intentional and controlled, as opposed to at the whim of the game. But like in my experience with poker, or even the less luck-driven tic-tac-toe, I found that once you “figure out” the strategy of the game, and how you’re going to play each scenario, it becomes easy to engineer and a little dry in its predictability.
This dryness is heightened by the low incentive to take risk. Because there are so few cards, bets rarely get high, and in our 3-player game, we agreed that there was very little point in betting above 4 tiles, or taking risks in general. We thought this might be improved by making hand size larger, allowing for more variations in betting. This was slightly mitigated in the endgame, when we had a lot more information about what was on the board: I had removed Jason’s skull from play, and Steph’s two remaining tiles had been flipped so that we knew what she still had in play, as well. Two of us were also one round from winning, which encouraged risk because the game would end either way if we didn’t stop the right player. This shift made it so that generally, our experience of the game improved as we played. At first, we noted that we weren’t particularly invested in the theme or narrative. As tension built, the theme became more believable – skulls were dangerous, and I imagined that we were playing in the kind of mysterious tavern that Indiana Jones would have met a local contact in before plundering an ancient burial site, or something. The narrative remained uncompelling – there was a forgettable insert about the discovery of the game in some exoticized, far-off tribe, but the actual gameplay didn’t carry much story to it. I found this to be fine, as I enjoyed the interactive aspect of it more than the immersive, but a tighter concept may have made it strong in both aspects.
The key disappointment with Skull, however, was that despite the escalation and building of tension in the endgame, the win condition felt boring. There was no real achievement, or remarkable milestone, in a win that just consisted of winning two rounds. We found a seemingly arbitrary number (even making it three might have helped?) of won rounds to be an anticlimactic end to a game that made itself out to be dangerous and high-stakes. Overall, Skull was a simple game with a strategic learning curve and a tense endgame, that suffers from a small scale, making it predictable, and a weak narrative, making it forgettable.
