Benndorf makes quick-playing games with simple rules and is best known for Qwixx and The Game, both Spiel des Jahres nominees in Germany. Verflucht! mirrors The Game in that it's a cooperative card game for 1-5 players in which communications between those players is limited. An overview:
In Verflucht!, players work cooperatively to battle monsters drawn from a central pile of cards, trying to achieve the best score possible.
The deck consists of red cards with creatures on them and green cards with items valued from 1 to 40. These cards are mixed face down on the table, while a set of seal cards are placed in a stack. On a turn, the active player draws a card from the center of the table and looks at it. If it shows an item, they take the card on the hand without revealing its value. If the drawn card is a creature, they must place the card face up in the display. The player now has the chance to expel one of the red creatures with one (or more) green cards, and the collective value of the items played must be at least as high as the value of the creature. Players need to somehow decide among themselves who should drive away which creature or else valuable items will be spent fruitlessly!
The creatures don't lie dormant on display. When the sixth creature is placed in the display, the most powerful creature present attack; the same thing happens when creatures form a group (i.e., when their values are in a numerical order). The players must expel these monsters immediately, and if they can't, they must use a seal to expel all the monsters; when this happens, the monsters are re-shuffled with the remaining face-down cards. When all face-down cards have been drawn and all attacks successfully defeated, the players win. To determine their score, placee all unused seals on the remaining creatures in the display. The collective value of the remaining creatures equals the players' score. How low can you go?
• Let's move from face-down monsters to face-down critters of a more docile nature: house cats. In The Cat, from Brad Ross, Don Ullman, and Jack Ullman, players need to serve as cat psychiatrists of a sort in order to get their cats acting consistently all the time:
Once a round begins, all players simultaneously exchange exactly one card from one of their stacks with a card from the center of the table; exchanging cards from one stack to another is forbidden. As soon as a player has collected four identical cards in each of their stacks, they shout, "Stop!" to end the current round. Everyone then reveals their stacks, and for each stack with four identical cards, the owner of that stack scores 1 point. The player who ended the round scores 1 bonus point as long as they didn't make a mistake; if they did, they score 0 points for the round. The game ends as soon as a player has reached 20 points, and whoever has the most points wins!
To start, each player receives three life tokens and two reserve cards at random, which they place face up in front of themselves. They then receive a hand of cards, the order of which they cannot change. The start player for a round leads by playing a combination of up to three cards, and these cards must be next to one another in that player's hand. A player can lay down a single card, a pair, a triple, or a run of two or three consecutive cards. Each player in turn must beat the combination, with a pair being beaten by a higher pair or a triple. If you cannot or will not play, you instead pick up one of your reserve cards, placing it where you choose within your hand. If you have no more reserve cards, then you must discard a life token.
Once each player has played or passed, whoever played the highest combination wins that round and begins the next round. If a player must discard a life token but has none, this player loses the game and everyone else wins.
Before play, all the cards are distributed evenly among the players. Once a player leads a single card for the first trick, all other players must play a card of the same suit, if possible. If a player can't play on suit, they can play a card of any color — but after they do this, all subsequent players can play a card of either matching color (or possibly a third color if they have neither of the first two).
Once all players have played to the trick, you see which color has been played most frequently in the trick. Whoever played the highest card of this color wins the trick. If two or more colors are tied, then the color with the highest sum counts as the winner.
You play several rounds until someone reaches the target number of tricks taken. At that point, whoever has captured the fewest tricks wins!
• All You Can Eat is the same game as Food Chain, a Kevin G. Nunn design that Mayfair Games announced in mid-2017, but which hasn't yet appeared in stores. In the game, you try to outguess what others will play so that you can eat their cards instead of being eaten yourself.
• Alex Randolph's Hol's der Geier turns thirty years old in 2018, so AMIGO is bringing out a new edition of the game, which it last released in 2011. This game is a classic, a pure distillation of simultaneous card play that always creates tension and endless second- (and third-) guessing.