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These types of games often seem old-fashioned given the number of modern releases that require a 30-60 minute teaching session prior to the start of play. The Hot Games Room at BGG.CON 2021, for example, featured one quick-to-learn game (Furnace), one easy-to-medium game (Azul: Queen's Garden), and thirteen involved titles. What's more, simple games often look unexciting because they're card games or have few components compared to the mountain of bits featured in more involved games.
So in the spirit of being old-fashioned, today I'm going to highlight an older game: 2017's Templari from designer Michael Schacht and publisher Igiari, a game that originally appeared in slightly different form as Don in 2001 from Queen Games and as Serengeti in 2006 from ABACUSSPIELE. (I'll note that Raphaël Bernardi of Igiari used — with permission and without pay — my edited rulebook for Don as the basis for the English rules for Templari. Before I wrote game news for a living, I edited rulebooks for fun.)
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In Templari, each of the 3-5 players starts with 12 coins, and they will use this money (and money they earn) to purchase cards, with the 30 cards coming in six colors, with five cards in each color. The cards are numbered 0-9, with each number appearing three times and with no color repeating a number on its five cards.
On a turn, two cards are revealed, then players take turns bidding on these cards until all but one player has passed. This high bidder adds these two cards to their collection and pays their money to...well, this is one of two interesting wrinkles in the design.
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If, however, your winning bid ends with a 7 — whether 7, 17, or 27 — and one or more players own cards that bear a 7, then only those players receive a portion of your winning bid. If only one player has a 7, then they receive all 7 (or 17) coins from you; if two players have a 7, then they each receive 3 coins with the remaining 1 coin going in the center.
But, wait, you might ask: Why don't you just make bids that match the cards you own? This is the second interesting wrinkle, the one that makes the game so compelling: You cannot make a bid that ends in a number that you own. At the start of the game, you can bid any number you can afford to pay, but if later you hold a 2, 3, 5, and 7, then you can only bid with values 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 19, etc. The more that you win, the more you get squeezed in what you can bid in the future — and everyone knows what bids you can make, so inevitably they try to push you into making a bid that will benefit them. If the player before you has cards numbered 8 and 9, they will often jump to a bid of 7 to attempt to profit from your winning bid of 8 or 9, assuming you even have enough coins to bid that high.
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You might think of specializing only in particular numbers so as not to restrict your bidding, but as I noted above no color repeats a number — and this detail is important because at the end of the game you score 1-15 points for collecting 1-5 cards of a color. (Having the most coins at game's end is worth 2 points.)
Therefore, you want to specialize in collecting all of a color, if possible, but doing so will place five numbers in your collection, locking you out of half the bidding possibilities. By game's end, the player in the upper left of the image above could bid only 3, 6, 8, 13, 16, etc., while the player in the upper right could bid only 2, 4, 12, 14, etc. That jump from 4 to 12 puts a huge crimp in your ability to make smart bids!
Is that Marlon Brando?!
The constrictions of Templari's tight rules pack a lot of tension into a quick playtime. Everyone starts with nothing, but you set stakes in colors with the first lot you win — and you're encouraged to bid higher than you might at first as you want to lock in potential income through the cards that you win, creating bidding landmines for everyone else while realizing that you will be dancing soon enough yourself.
How can you acquire Templari? BGG has two copies remaining in the BGG Store, and beyond that you can look for used copies of that game, Don, or Serengeti. As for why I find the game enticing, I talk more about that in this video, while also demonstrating play in more detail:
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