Dead Man’s Draw is a push-your-luck card game with a pirate theme to it. Kat got the limited edition via the Kickstarter, based on her enjoyment of the video game on iOS.  I believe it’s also on Steam and a few other places, based on my reading of their website.

You need a decent area to play this game in, as every player will be keeping up to 10 stacks of cards in front of you, as well as a draw and discard pile, and another card which gives a special ability. Every t urn you must draw a card and play it, and then you may play another card.  Each card has an effect (drawing both a key and a chest lets you take cards into your stacks without having to play them).  You can stop at any time and take the cards you have, or you can draw more.  Once you’ve drawn a suit twice, you bust and the cards go into the discard instead of into your stacks (of course, there’s a suit that breaks this rule).

The cards have numbers printed on them from 2-7 and the goal is to have the highest possible value of each suit. At the end of the game, the highest cards of each suit that you have are added together to form your score.  Highest is the winner.  The randomized characters give each player a different ability which adjusts how they play — in the first game I had a card which got me all the opponents cards when they went bust, so Kat went super-careful and rarely busted.  She wound up winning both the games we played that day, although I hope for revenge someday soon.

Like Love Letter this is an easy to learn and quick to play game that I suspect we’ll play again. I’d like to see how it plays with more players, although that might really unbalance the powers some.