YORKTON - This pre-Halloween offering comes from designer Stephen Tavener with Box of Spiders.
This is among a rather limited – at least in terms of our card game finds – number of card games which are essentially perfect information abstract strategy games, which readers will know are generally favoured by this writer.
Box of Spiders is played with a standard deck of playing cards, including two jokers.
The full deck of cards is dealt face-up into a 6x9 grid; which is the play area.
The game is two-player, with one player assigned the red number cards (red spiders), while player two has the black number cards (black spiders).
Court cards and jokers are flies, and are neutral.
Game play here is super simple in regards to rules to learn, but that doesn’t mean BoS is simple, or easy to win.
Each turn consists of a player making a capture.
The player moves a spider orthogonal only, (like a rook in chess), of their colour over any number of friendly pieces and empty spaces onto a fly or an enemy spider of equal or lower value.
This makes the 10 the primary card, lose it early to the other 10 and you are in some definite trouble.
You will want to try to isolate the opposition 10 but that is a challenge.
The moved spider, (card), must stop on the first fly or enemy piece it encounters.
When a spider moves onto a fly or enemy spider, that card has been eaten. The spider forms a stack with all the cards it has eaten, and these move around with the spider; so eating a spider that has made multiple captures is more lucrative than eating a spider that has not moved, explains a design post on boardgamegeek.com
If no capture is possible, the player must pass.
When both players pass, the game ends. Players score one point for each remaining spider of their colour, and one point for each captured card.
That’s it for the game, quick to learn, lay-out, and play, yet as an abstract strategy game that uses cards is different enough from most card games to be recommended to try out, but do not expect gold here. It’s ‘thinky’ but is just good enough to give a whirl, although not likely to be for most – except maybe as a Halloween treat.
