Thoughts on… Smoke & Mirrors

 

Our preview copy of Smoke & Mirrors was very kindly sent to us by its designer Chip Beauvais. As this is a preview copy, the component quality is not necessarily representative of the final game. Smoke & Mirrors is on Kickstarter until August 29^th.

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“Ladies and Gentlemen, the New Strand Theatre is proud to introduce Marc, magician extraordinaire!” 

The crowd cheers as the curtain is raised on a darkened stage, smoke billowing across the aged wooden planks. A man dressed in all the finery of a stage magician, top hat and all, walks out to the centre of the stage. Slowly, he passes his gaze across the audience. Within the expectant hush not even the rustle of cheap popping corn packets can be heard…

“Three!” His voice booms as he reveals a red backed card. 

 

  

A gasp of awe passes through the crowd. Could he have it!? Could he really be holding the three!? 

“Rubbish!”

Another gasp racks the audience, no longer in awe but in outrage. Up on the stage, beads of sweat begin to appear on Marc’s brow.

He throws down the card. “Goddamnit Chris, how’d you know?”

 

Smoke & Mirrors is a new micro game, featured as part of publisher Button Shy’s Wallet Series on Kickstarter. It features a tiny 18 cards and will come in its own, delightful wallet for easy transport to games nights (or pubs, or your local magic hall). Indeed, it’s so small that your biggest concern might be accidentally… making it disappear! (Magic jokes? No? Ok…)

You will be playing as stage magicians during the great magic show age, trying constantly to out do your friends. Each game round you’ll receive one card from each of the game’s three suits, and on your turn you will lay a number of them down to claim they add up to a specific number. Except a lot of the time they probably won’t! But it’s up to the opponent sitting next to you to call your bluff.

That anyone can hope to guess what cards you might have comes down to how the cards are distributed within the suits. The orange “stars” suit is all 1s, except for a mirror. The purple “skulls” suit is all 5s, again except for a mirror. The red “spirals” however, feature cards 1,2,3,4,5… and a mirror. Knowing this, players can predict what tricks are easiest to perform. 1s, 5s and 6s can all be pretty much guaranteed on (though sometimes players might be holding that mirror…), whereas 3s, 4s and higher numbers require specific combinations of cards to pull off. The mirror cards are worth nothing on their own, but double the value of any card they are played with, and can be extremely powerful tools for bluffing. Whether you have one or not!

Once per round, players can also skip their number, and the timing of this skip can have a huge impact. By skipping later, you will have a big advantage over your opponent. Forcing them to play multiple rounds with higher value cards is a good way of forcing a players’ back against the wall. Call someone’s bluff correctly, and that player is out of the game. Get it wrong and you’re ejected from the magic hall by your coat tails. Be the last player standing to win!

 

 

Now, you might be thinking that this sounds like the kind of game you might play with anyone! Some kind of Skull, or Coup, like casual-friendly game. However in my experience, it’s probably not. Despite the simple card distribution, you really need to be paying strict attention to what cards the opponent to your right is claiming over multiple turns. Even better, you should be trying to track what everyone is playing, since that can give you clues and might help you catch people out. There’s a fair element of card counting that goes into this game, and since players are eliminated secretly, without revealing their cards, it doesn’t get easier over time like in Coup or Love Letter.

A key element of magical shows is figuring out how the magician has done it. And in Smoke & Mirrors there is a strong requirement for players to work at catching their opponents out early. In the worst case, this can happen:

Player             1          2          3          4          5

Claim 1           1          2          3          4          5

All using red cards (well, except players 1 and 5 most likely), no challenges, so!

Claim 2           6          7          8          9          10

Just adding a purple to their previous cards. If the first set of claims go through, most likely the second set go through too. Then the third set of claims all get challenged because almost no one will be able to make a combination greater than 10 and it just comes down to luck or worse, seating position, to determine who wins. Having 5 players really accentuates this issue, and the game at this level desperately needs players to be aggressive with the challenges.

At 3 or 4 players, however, this cycle breaks down and players will definitely have to bluff their cards. But when are they bluffing!? Now we’ve got a game on! For example:

Alex gets lucky and knocks Chris out, allowing him to swap for one of Chris’ cards. He swaps the purple, then immediately lays down a red and purple card to claim “4”. Holy sh*t, I’m thinking, did he just get the mirror off Chris!? It’s so unlikely but the sheer ballsiness of this move makes me doubt he’s bluffing. But then next turn he lays down the same two cards to claim “7”, and I’m banging my head on the table that I let him get away with it!

 

 

I really love the theme of this game! Now while I could point out that a purple and orange card trick is the famous sawing a rabbit in half trick, the cards you play isn’t the important part of the theme. It’s what the overall game represents. It channels the spirit of the film, The Prestige. The constantly having to out-do your rival part, not so much the murder, obsession and weird pseudo-science parts (fortunately!). And for a micro game, it really captures the feeling of it’s theme rather well.

Overall, I would recommend Smoke & Mirrors to gamers and groups who will be willing to challenge and pay attention to their opponents’ plays. While bluffing in Coup is simple to grasp, the strategies in this game are subtler. The game only really comes alive when players start to explore these options, which requires some thought and experimentation. Much like the stage magic theme the game has wrapped itself in, it is easy to trick a casual audience, but the real challenge and reward comes from tricking those determined to see through you.

 

 

If you’ve enjoyed this review and want to check out the game, it is available on Kickstarter until August 29th!