Haggis Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Haggis, a climbing game published by Indie Board and Cards. Haggis is a new spin on the trick taking genre that will have you trying to shed your hand first.

Describing the coalescence of features that come together to create a board game is often a futile affair: the secret ingredient, the “Wow Factor”, the “Chemical X” of it all just seems to get lost. Sometimes a game’s pure existence feels like magic, or, and I say this with full respect to the designers out there, an accident. Sometimes what comes out of a family of mechanisms is an indescribable symphony, where all its individual pieces are meaningless separately, but awe-inspiring when combined.

This is where Haggis comes in. And Sean Ross is here to conduct us through his magnum opus.

In the card game of Haggis, 2-3 players will be competing against one another in what is referred to as a “climbing game”. Climbing games are a variant of trick-taking games, and trick-taking games are those games you watched your grandmother play: games like Bridge, Spades, and Euchre.

A climbing game takes the traditional rules of the trick-taking formula and adds to them: instead of being able to play just one card at a time, players can play sets (multiples of the same number) or sequences (runs of the same suit, with ascending, sequential numbers) from their hand as their “lead card”. To beat what I led, players would simply have to have higher values of the same quantity of cards, meaning three 2’s are beat by three 4’s.

Haggis also adds bombs. Bombing a trick changes the rules of what’s happening on the table: they act as a climbing game’s version of a trump. Even if I led five 10s, if someone were to bomb that trick, then they are now leading that trick, and all