Skulls of Sedlec Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Skulls of Sedlec, a 18-card game published by Buttonshy Games. In Skulls of Sedlec, players are competing to earn the most points by drafting cards into their tableau.

One of my pet peeves in gaming is people who demand themes in their games. Who really cares? Give me a bunch of great mechanisms, slap on some nonsense theme about collecting varieties of olives or rearranging boats at a Viking harbor and I’m all set. Imagine my surprise when I was sent a micro game to review and I discovered it actually had a decent-ish theme. I didn’t even know that was possible!

Skulls of Sedlec is for 2-3 players, takes just about 15 minutes to play, and—remarkably—has solid thematic ties. It’s designed by Dustin Dobson.

At the start of the game, all 18 cards will be put into a Graveyard (the game’s thematic name for its market) consisting of six stacks with three cards each. One of these cards will be flipped face up. On each player’s turn, they can do one of three things: Dig, which involves revealing the top card of two stacks in the Graveyard, Collect, which has the player selecting one card from the Graveyard and adding it to their hand, and Stack, which is how a player can take a card already in their hand and add it to their personal, pyramid-shaped tableau (also confusingly called their Stack). Players have a hand limit of two cards, so the decisions about when to Dig and Collect are important.

Placement rules when going into the Stack aren’t terribly restrictive, but each player must start on the bottom row and then add adjacently. The stack can be added to vertically at any time so long as there are two cards—bodies?—directly underneath the added card. The cards themselves score based on interactions with other