Haggis

Haggis is a shedding card game similar to Tichu, Zheng Fen, and other East Asian climbing games. Haggis has received praise for being the first to successfully create a climbing, trick-taking game, designed from the start for two to three players, where most previous games required four players or more. The evenly distributed, face card "bombs" are a notable innovation for the genre, helping even out hand strength enough to make two-person play workable, and enhancing the strategic element of the game. The game's designer, Sean Ross, developed Haggis over a period of several years, with first publication in late 2010 by Indie Boards and Cards. The game was named after haggis partly in a nod to Ross' Scottish heritage, but also because the game brought together the "guts" (scoring and play mechanisms) of several other climbing games. Haggis was a nominee for "Best Card Game" in the 2010 Golden Geek Awards by BoardGameGeek. Rules summary Players attempt to accumulate points; the first to reach a predetermined score (usually 250 or 350) is the winner. The scoring of Haggis gives incentives for capturing cards and for going out first. Successful players balance these two goals to strive for the most points. Additional points may be gained by successfully betting you'll be the first to shed your hand. A valid card combination may be a set, a sequence or a bomb: a "set" is a group of any number of cards of the same rank (ex: one "8", two "5", ...). a "sequence" is a group of 3 or more cards of the same color with consecutive rank (ex: red 8, red 9, red 10) a "sequence" can also be a group of 2 or more pairs or larger sets of consecutive rank sharing the same suits between sets (ex: blue 3, green 3, blue 4, green 4, blue 5, green 5) a "bomb" is one of the following combinations (ranked below from weakest to strongest): 3-5-7-9 (in 4 different colors, "rainbow bomb") J-Q J-K Q-K J-Q-K 3-5-7-9 (in one color, "suited bomb") Face cards can be used as wild cards to replace any cards in a "set" or a "sequence". Each player starts a round with a Jack, a Queen and a King. These face cards are public. The face cards can also be used individually as their actual rank, thus a single Jack can be played to beat a single 10, a Queen to beat a Jack, etc. Two face cards may not be played as a pair, such as a Jack and King played as a pair of Kings, because this combination is a bomb and must be played as such.