Players: 3-4
Playing Time: 1-2 hours
Complexity: 3 (of 10)

The Components

Golden Deuce comes in an oversized "big game" box, with some extra components to make that worthwhile. The components include:

• A deck of cards
• A game board
• Marker stones
• A rulesheet

Deck of Cards: The cards come in a small tuckbox, emphasizing that this is all you really need to play the game. There are sixty total, plus four reference cards.They're all printed on medium card stock, with rounded corners, but without any gloss or coating, and as a result the cards are already starting to show wear.

There are four colors of cards (gold, crimson, purple, and jade), with an Ace and 2-15 in each suit. Each card has its value printed at top and bottom right and dragons at the other corners. Each card also depicts something in the middle--a Chinese symbol for the number for A-10 and a picture for the "face" cards, 11-15 (guard, princess, prince, empress, and emperor).

The symbols for the face cards are all nice, thematic pictures that are done in three colors: black, white, and a dark shade of the card's color. The Chinese symbols for 2-10, however, look badly pixelated. Perhaps this was a purposeful decision, but I doubt it. The symbols each look like they were blown up to about 1000% of their original size, and this really affects the quality and professionalism of the cards. The dragons which are all over have similar problems--obvious, but not quite as bad.

Despite the problems, the cards are pretty, easy to read, and colorful.

Two of the reference cards list the rules for the game. The other two have the rank of suits and cards on front and the rank of tricks on the back. The most useful thing here is the rank of suits (gold, crimson, purple, jade, as it happens). The rank of tricks is somewhat confusing because it lists five-card hands as better than three of a kind as better than a pair as better than a single, which simply isn't true. (Once you get beyond that, the ranking of the various five-card hands is very handy, and it's a pity that they didn't just print four of these double-sided ranking cards, as all the players could have used one.)

Game Board: The game board is simply a forty-space track that's used for scoring, which some special rules for some of the spaces. It's printed over four-folds on very sturdy cardboard that's nicely textured on the back. It's pretty overly produced for what it does and has more of those dragons on it, overly blown up.

I'll also comment that, if a big board was going to be included, I really wish they'd printed some of the reference material on it, like those aforementioned ranks that appear on just those two reference cards.

Marker Stones: These are glass stones in the four player colors: jade, gold, purple, and crimson.

Rulesheet:The rulesheet is a four-panel sheet printed in black on yellow, very plainly, without illustrations or much in the way of graphical flourishes. The rules are a bit hard to read and miss out on some vital points, like what to do if two players tie for cards left in a round, which should happen with some frequency. (In this same scoring section, the rules description and the example also don't match.) The actual rulesheet is also misprinted, so that the pages read, in order: 1, 3, 2, 4. Since the pages aren't actually numbered, I found them totally incomprehensible until I figured out the misprinting.

Box: The box is a square, medium-sized box. It's a typical American printing, which means it's just slightly flimsy. There's a tray which sections the box off into a big dead space and a narrow slot down the middle, which is good because most of the box space is unnecessary.

Sometimes card game publishes find it necessary to publish their game in larger boxes for various marketing and sales reasons. I'm usually willing to accept that, but this production is particularly egregious, with the overall gamebox being 10-20x the size of the tuckbox holding the actually cards. Nonetheless, I'll concede that the publisher did a good job of keeping the price point fairly reasonable. I don't mind paying $21.95 for a card game in the current market, especially whent he publisher has gone to trouble to include additional components. I do, however, mind having such a huge box take up space on my shelves.

If all other things were in balance, I probably would have given Golden Deuce an average Style rating. However, a lot of the components really felt that they were a Freshman effort, from those overly enlarged graphics on the cards and board to the plain and misprinted rulebook. Thus I've reduced my Style rating to "2" out of "5", mainly on the basis of graphic design issues.

(As a final comment, I think my assessment of the design of Golden Deuce as a Freshman effort is correct: as far as I can tell it was one of Playroom Entertainment's first four games, published in early 2002. More recent releases such as Chekov and Killer Bunnies & The Quest for the Magic Carrot have higher production values all around.)

The Game Play

Golden Deuce is a simple value-climbing card game, which means that when cards are played you must continually play tricks of higher value than what's already down. You ultimately win Golden Deuce by making sure you have the least cards in your hand at the end of each round.

The Cards: There are 60 cards, divided into four color-coded suits. Each suit has 15 cards, an Ace and a 2-15. There's one strangeness in the valuation: the 3 is the lowest card, while the Ace goes above the 15, and the deuce goes above that. Since the order of the suits is, lowest to highest, jade, purple, crimson, gold, that means that the Golden Deuce is the highest card in the game, hence the name.

Order of Play: At the beginning of each round hand, each player is dealt 13 cards. The remaining cards (8 for a 4-player game or 21 for a 3-player game or 34 for a 2-player game) are set to the side as a draw pile.

Value Climbing: The dealer is initially the player who has the lowest card in his hand (the Jade 3, or else the Purple 3, or else the Crimson 3, etc). On future rounds the first leader will instead be the player who won the last round of play.

The leader initiates a round of play by choosing a number of cards: 1, 2, 3, or 5. He then leads a legal hand with that number of cards. Legal hands are:

• 1 card: singleton
• 2 cards: pair
• 3 cards: three of a kind
• 5 cards: in order of value: straight, flush, four of a kind (which includes an extra card with that 4 of a kind, to make five), full house (pair and three of a kind), or straight flush

Once a round of play has been led all players must follow with a legal play of the same number of cards. If they wish to follow they must play a set of the same number of cards that is higher in value than the previous play.

This can be obvious--a "5" singleton beats a "2"--or subtle--a crimson "2" beats a purple "2". In a five card hand you'll often climb up through the Poker hands: e.g., a 1-2-3-4-5 straight with green "5" followed by a 1-2-3-4-5 straight with golden "5" followed by a 6-8-9-11-13 crimson flush followed by a full house, twelves over tens.

If you instead decide to pass (either because you wish to or must) then you have to draw from the draw pile, if there's still cards there.

Play continues round and round the table until someone plays a set of cards that causes everyone else to pass. At that point that person becomes the new leader. He may initiate a new round of play with a set size of his choice.

End of a Hand: A hand continues until a player plays his last cards. At this point a scoring round commences.

A player scores a number of points in the round based on the number of cards held by each of his opponents that did worse than him. A hand of cards is valued based on the number of cards left: less than 8 and the cards are worth 1 point each; 8-12 and they're 2 points each; and more and they're 3 points each.

The winner gets the sum value of all of his opponents' cards. The second place finisher gets the value of the third and fourth place players, minus his own. The third-place finisher gets just the value of the fourth place player minus his own. Adjust as obvious for a two- or three-player game.

And as a bonus rule: if someone had the Golden Deuce in their hand at the end of a round, all their opponents get 5 extra points.

But, you don't just mark these points down. Instead you score them on the game board. The game board is a 40-space track; each player has 4 stones in his color, and he wins by getting all the stones through the track. After each hand a player can either move a piece on the board or put a new piece on the board. It's kind of a simplified Parcheesi, with each player having to score 160 points to win.

There are a couple of catches:

• You're never allowed to move more than one stone, unless you move all your stones from off board that turn. (So, if you wanted to score 60 points, you'd have to have two stones off board and move the first all the way around for 40 points and the second halfway across the board for 20 points.)
• If you have extra points when you move a stone to the finish, they're lost (barring the all-off-board-stone rule).
• There are also four special spaces on the board, which let you move forward or back a little bit. More notably, there are also two "warp" spaces which can hop you from space 9 to 35--or vice versa. You take the effects of these spaces if you land on them when scoring.

After everyone is scored the next hand begins. The person who gets to lead the new hand is the player who won the last one (irrespective of who has that Jade 3 or other low card).

Winning the Game: The game is won when a player has gotten all four of his stones around the board and has won a final hand (either the hand where he removed his last stone from the board, or a later hand).

Relationships to Other Games

Golden Deuce is from a family of card games called "value climbing" games. They're not very common in the United States, but are seen pretty frequently in the Orient. I'm aware of six professionally produced value climbing games that have been released in English in the last decade or so. They are: Tichu (1991), The Great Dalmuti (1995), Dilbert: Corporate Shuffle (1997), Golden Deuce (2002), and Gang of Four (2002).

Each of these games seems to have been directed toward a slightly different audience. The Great Dalmuti and Dilbert are each primarily offered as party games, with no scoring. Tichu and Gang of Four are serious strategy games, with the former having some complexities not available in the latter. Golden Deuce seems more oriented toward a family audience, with the scoreboard and the draw-a-card aspects increasing the randomness and decreasing the strategic thought necessary to play the game.

The Game Design

I should start off by saying that I'm a fan of Climbing games. In the year since I originally reviewed Gang of Four I've played that game something like 70 times, most of them thanks to the online Gang of Four server. I've also skimmed over the rules of some of the other variants, from Dilbert to Tichu. This all goes to say that I have strong opinions of what make a good Climbing game.

Generally, I think that Climbing games are fast paced and allow a high level of strategy that you only see in the best card games. For a good hand of a Climbing game, you can break down how you expect to play every single card from your hand, in terms of leads and plays--and with any luck you'll succeed at your plan. At the same time, the Climbing games can be simply played; you're not going to win if you don't have a plan, but on the other hand it's easy to simply play, following leads and dropping down what cards you can. And, the more someone plays in this simplistic manner, the more he'll figure out how to improve his strategy.

As a strategic game player, Golden Deuce unfortunately fails me:

Strategy Undercut: The biggest undercutting of Golden Deuce's strategy is in the decision to force a card draw whenever you pass. This means that you can't make a hand-long strategy because you're inevitably going to draw more cards into your hand as you go. Likewise, it makes strategic passing--an important component of most similar games--a severe disadvantage.

The board further undercuts the strategy of Golden Deuce. Because there are various random effects, you can find yourself facing a bad setback even if you'd played well.

Finally, I think that the distribution of cards choosen for Golden Deuce further undercuts the strategy, though I'll state this could be more of a personal like issue. In any case, with 4 suits and a starting hand of 13 cards you're unlikely to get many Flushes. Likewise, with only 4 of each numbered card, the likelihood of pulling straights or even threes-of-a-kind goes down. (Compared to, say, Gang of Four, where you have only three colors, but six cards at each numerical level.) This all amounts to minimal Poker hands during a round of play. Instead, you see lots of singletons and doubles, which just don't allow for a lot of strategy.

I had one other real complaint about the game:

Adapted Well Only for 4 Players: There's no special rules for two- or three-player play, though it's offically supported. Unfortunately there are two big flaws for playing with less than four. First, the "draw pile" gets much larger the more people you have. In 4-player play you'll only have to draw for the first few hands; in 3-player play you'll draw for half the hand; and in 2-player play I imagine you'd be drawing for just about forever. This results in lower and lower strategy the less players you have. In addition, since you score based on how well other people do, in a 2-player game and to some extent a 3-player game, the game length will go up fairly dramatically, because you just never get many points.

If I were grading Golden Deuce as a strategic game, I'd give it a below average "2" out of "5"; there are major problems here. However, I try to review games as to how well they fit their intended audience. Considering Golden Deuce instead as a family game I think it can eke out a "3" out of "5". Personally, I don't agree with the decisions as to how the game was made more "family friendly". I think a family could have dealt fine without the drawing aspect of the game and definitely without the board; I played enough games of Hearts growing up to know that my family at least could count to 100.

Still, I'd definitely put Golden Deuce forward over Uno or other such simplistic card games offered to the family audience, hence the average rating of "3".

Conclusion

If you're a strategic game player, you'd do better with Tichu or Gang of Four for a card game of this sort. However, if you're looking for something for the family, and the board-based scoring and simpler gameplay sound like they might appeal to you and yours, this is worth considering.