Players: 3-6
Time: 14-45 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)
The Components
Poison comes with 50 cards, 3 cauldrons, and 1 rulebook.
The Cards: The cards are all medium weight, printed on nice, linen-textured cardstock. They come in three suits: red potions, blue potions, and purple potions, plus the green poison. Each suit has a unique bottle on it, and each card has a value depicted at two of the four corners. They're overall quite attractive and easy to use.
The Cauldrons: Very thick cardboard cauldrons, each used to hold one of the three card types.
The Rulebook: A 12-page, full-color rulebook. It actually has instructions in English, Spanish, and French. The English rules take up just three pages, including two pages which are almost entirely examples. The rules are easy to follow, while the examples are a nice addition and well illustrated.
Overall Poison is definitely overproduced. The box is about 10x as big as it needs to be, largely to accomodate the large (and somewhat unnecessary) cauldrons. Presonally I would have preferred a much smaller game that I could carry around as a simple filler. However as I sometimes write in my card game reviews, I'm usually willing to forgive this excess, because I understand that card game manufacturers need to get shelf space & attention that a card-game sized box wouldn't allow. Still, this packaging is more excessive than most.
Beyond that the components of Poison are high-quality, attractive, and easy to use. And, given the huge cauldrons, the price point is pretty reasonable. Thus I've given Poison a rating of "4" out of "5" for Style: above average.
The Game Play
The object of Poison is to score the least points throug accrual of cards (and especially poisons) over multiple rounds of play.
Setup: The three cauldrons are set in the middle of the table. The cards are dealt out among all the players.
Playing a Card: On a turn a player must play one of his cards. If he plays a potion card it must go into a cauldron with no other color potions in it (and there can only be one cauldron per color). After a round or two of play, each cauldron has its own color potion in it, and tends to stay that way for the rest of the game. If he plays a poison card, a player can play it into any cauldron.
If the total value of the cards in a cauldron execeeds 13, the player must then take all the cards from that cauldron except for the one he just put in. (There's a slightly odd distribution to the cards--1, 2, 4, 5, 7 for the potions--which creates more interesting gameplay as players often rush to fill the cauldrons most of the way, then drop in the last few "1" or "2" values, usually topping the cauldrons at "13" before they overflow.)
Ending a Round: After everyone has played all their cards, the current round of play is scored.
First the players all see who has the most of each potion color. Each player with the most of a color gets to discard all the cards that he took of that color. In cases of ties, no one does.
Then each player scores 1 point for each potion card he ends up with and 2 points for each poison.
Ending the Game: Theoretically the game goes a number of rounds equal to the number of players, and then whoever has the lowest score wins.
Personally I think that takes too long for a game of this weight, and I've just played one or two rounds, then totalled up scores, for the couple of games I played. That seems to work considerably better.
Relationship to Other Games
A couple of different players have compared Poison to Hearts. They're both penalty games, where you're trying to avoid taking cards, but I find the structures very different, because Hearts is trick-taking, while you get cards in Poison through much more unusual methods.
Personally I find Poison closest in feel to the classic 6 Nimmt! (or Take 5 or Category 5 as you wish). In both games card taking is bad, and you take cards through interactions of cards played to the table by yourself and other players over much longer lengths of time than a simple trick.
Finally, Poison fits pretty clearly in with Knizia's simple card games which tend to have more strategic depth than you'd guess. Loco is another (though one that I liked less).
The Game Design
Poison is a very simple game. It's easy to explain and easy to play. As long as you don't feel obligated to play more than one or two rounds, it thus makes a great filler.
The game is not very deep, but it does have some strategic & tactical elements, and in fact more than you'd expect from the very simple gameplay. Deciding which cauldrons to load up with poison, when to take cauldrons early, and when to try and hold out are just some the decisions. The majority-control scoring (where you don't take points if you have the most of a color) also adds a lot to the game.
I think this is a game that probably plays best with 4; it works with just 3, but becomes increasingly easy to split the potion cards in a way that no one gets points, while the more players it has the more chaotic it becomes.
Overall, as an enjoyable filler Poison earns an average "3" out of "5" for Substance. It's a fine though not amazing game.
Conclusion
Poison is a nicely produced new and simple Reiner Knizia game. Like classics such as Loco! (under its many names), Poison has very simple gameplay that still allows some strategic & tactical depth. This game is pure filler, but if you enjoy Knizia's other light fillers, this is a good alternative.
