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Big Manitou: A Mini-Review
Jun. 2nd, 2006 12:35 pmLast night I had folks over for my review night, as usual. One of the games we played was Big Manitou, a pseudo-trick-taking card game. I'm happy I did, as it'll get a mention in my next Knucklebones article, which is on commercial variants of traditional games (and Big Manitou is an excellent example of how far something can go from the core trick-taking model).
Big Manitou is played over fouthree to five rounds of play, and each of those rounds there are three different "hunting grounds" open, and you have about half a personal deck of cards available to play to try and take control of those hunting grounds.
Your cards are numbered 1-10, plus a set of 7 heroes (each of which overcomes some other heroes and is overcome by some others). On your turn you play 1 card to one of the hunting grounds, and at the end of a round the contents of a hunting ground are split up between the surviving hero and the best hunters at that ground.
I say the game is trick-taking, and if I were to be more specific I'd say it's a continuous trick-taking game with three simultaneous tricks and split rewards.
Continuous means that you keep playing cards, rather than each player just playing once. In this case, each player plays a total of seven cards. Three tricks refers to the three hunting grounds: you can play a card to any of the hunting grounds to try and get the rewards there. Your cards can end up spread out or they can end up all on the same hunting ground. The rewards have to do with the weird split of each hunting ground.
In general: the surviving hero gets the first reward, the person with the most warriors gets the next two, and the person with the second most warriors gets everything else. Notable is the fact that besides having a split reward for each "trick", there's also two main and orthagonal criteria for winning (heroes and warriors).
Overall the game is a very baroque trick-taking game. The English rules are somewhat short of atrocious, which probably contributes to the feeling of complexity. Besides all the elements I mentioned above, there's also a few special powers you can collect, to play last, to move something, or to get bonuses for your warriors.
I found Big Manitou really enjoyable to play. The 3-trick structure allows for a lot of brinkmanship as you try and maintain control in a number of different regions. The heroes are a bit odd since every hero can be beat by one or more other heroes. You're either trying to get two heroes out (so that one protects the other) before anyone else messes with a hunt, or else you're trying to time the final play perfectly. It's more brinkmanship.
I enjoyed it quite a lot on whole. It's not the be-all and end-all of trick-taking games, but if I played cards more regularly I'd definitely want this in my set.
I also think the cards are beautifully illustrated, and the Style of the game is top-notch.
My RPGnet rating would be a "5" for Style and a "4" for Substance, though the Substance rating is a bit wobbly and could move through additional play. That comes out to a "B+" on my letter grade scale.
I've been told I can't write a real review of Big Manitou without carefully noted that it's a revision of an older game called Manitou. Whatever.
Good game.
Big Manitou is played over fouthree to five rounds of play, and each of those rounds there are three different "hunting grounds" open, and you have about half a personal deck of cards available to play to try and take control of those hunting grounds.
Your cards are numbered 1-10, plus a set of 7 heroes (each of which overcomes some other heroes and is overcome by some others). On your turn you play 1 card to one of the hunting grounds, and at the end of a round the contents of a hunting ground are split up between the surviving hero and the best hunters at that ground.
I say the game is trick-taking, and if I were to be more specific I'd say it's a continuous trick-taking game with three simultaneous tricks and split rewards.
Continuous means that you keep playing cards, rather than each player just playing once. In this case, each player plays a total of seven cards. Three tricks refers to the three hunting grounds: you can play a card to any of the hunting grounds to try and get the rewards there. Your cards can end up spread out or they can end up all on the same hunting ground. The rewards have to do with the weird split of each hunting ground.
In general: the surviving hero gets the first reward, the person with the most warriors gets the next two, and the person with the second most warriors gets everything else. Notable is the fact that besides having a split reward for each "trick", there's also two main and orthagonal criteria for winning (heroes and warriors).
Overall the game is a very baroque trick-taking game. The English rules are somewhat short of atrocious, which probably contributes to the feeling of complexity. Besides all the elements I mentioned above, there's also a few special powers you can collect, to play last, to move something, or to get bonuses for your warriors.
I found Big Manitou really enjoyable to play. The 3-trick structure allows for a lot of brinkmanship as you try and maintain control in a number of different regions. The heroes are a bit odd since every hero can be beat by one or more other heroes. You're either trying to get two heroes out (so that one protects the other) before anyone else messes with a hunt, or else you're trying to time the final play perfectly. It's more brinkmanship.
I enjoyed it quite a lot on whole. It's not the be-all and end-all of trick-taking games, but if I played cards more regularly I'd definitely want this in my set.
I also think the cards are beautifully illustrated, and the Style of the game is top-notch.
My RPGnet rating would be a "5" for Style and a "4" for Substance, though the Substance rating is a bit wobbly and could move through additional play. That comes out to a "B+" on my letter grade scale.
I've been told I can't write a real review of Big Manitou without carefully noted that it's a revision of an older game called Manitou. Whatever.
Good game.