Base price: $20.
3 – 4 players.
Play time: 25 – 35 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Seven Prophecies was provided by New Mill Industries. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the preorder, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
Trick-taking games have been pretty in vogue, lately, and I kind of love it, personally. There’s always so many new things coming and going, mechanically, and I think players are getting excited by the sheer number of different things you can do in a trick-taking game. It’s a fairly blank slate for a variety of strategies, and even trick-taking-adjacent games have a lot going on. Hokkaido, Wicked & Wise, and others offer a whole host of different things to try, which is fun. But I digress. I’ve got a couple new trick-taking games from New Mill Industries, so I figured let’s chat about those over the next couple weeks. Let’s start with Seven Prophecies!
In Seven Prophecies, you’ve come up with a way to predict the future! Unfortunately, so have all your friends. (You knew they’d do that, jerks.) To settle who is the best prognosticator, you’ve decided to have a little competition. Everyone will play some cards while everyone tries to predict the future. As you assume, the future you all predict cannot be the same, so some of you must be incorrect! Only the greatest fortuneteller will be able to figure out the true future, so let’s get to it. Who will be right?
Contents
Setup
Not a ton. Each player gets a Prophecy Card; you can set the Score Cards aside for now:
Shuffle the Color Cards and make a row of 10 across the top of the play area:
Give each player Prophecy Cubes in the color of their choice:
Place the 1st – 4th cards in a column on the left side, and the scoring cards on the right side. Each player places a token near 0.
With only three players, remove the 10 and 11 of each suit. Shuffle the other cards and deal them out. Choose a player to start!
Gameplay
This one’s a bit challenging, but we’ll get through it. Each round is split into two phases: Prophecy and Trick. I suppose you set up the rounds, as well, but that’s covered in Setup.
For Prophecy, each player is going to look at their hand of cards and predict how they’re going to do in the round Unlike many trick-taking games that ask you to predict how many you’ll win, your goal here is to predict where you’ll end up (1st / 2nd / 3rd / 4th, with four players) correctly seven times. Good luck with that. Once everyone has made their predictions, the trick-taking begins!
This follows a pretty standard trick-taking formula with one exception. Instead of the lead player choosing a suit, the suit is predetermined in advance by the current round column (the leftmost empty column). Every player, starting with the lead player and going clockwise, must play a card of that suit if they have it. If they don’t, they can play whatever. After every player has played, move the cards to the correct spots (1st / 2nd / 3rd / 4th, with four players). The highest card of the required suit wins, and off-suit cards of the same value are tiebroken in favor of whichever card was played later.
If your place in a round matches one of your Prophecy Cubes, remove it from your card and place it on the card. If not, bummer. Then, the player who won the trick leads the next one.
The round can end in two ways:
- A player places all of their Prophecy Cubes
- 10 tricks are played.
When either happens, players score:
- If a player played their final Prophecy Cube by trick 7, they get 5 points.
- If a player played their final Prophecy Cube by trick 8, they get 3 points.
- If a player played their final Prophecy Cube by trick 9, they get 2 points.
- If a player played their final Prophecy Cube by trick 10, they get 1 point.
The player(s) with the fewest remaining Prophecy Cubes earn 1 point each, unless the round went to 10 tricks.
Set up for a new round unless a player has scored 7+ points or a number of rounds equal to the number of players has been played. If so, the player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
This one’s pretty easy. With three players, you use fewer cards total (no 10 / 11 and no 4th Place Prophecy), so you have less to predict and fewer cards in play. That said, it doesn’t really change the game otherwise; you’re still working on predicting where you’ll end up in the tricks you play. That said, I do love the high-chaos play of a four-player game. You’ll end up being fairly frustrated by other players’ rude inability to play exactly how you want them to play so that you can score the most points. It’s pretty inconsiderate of them. With three players, you might find the tricks a bit easier to predict, but that also assumes that your group isn’t just playing to mess with you. It’s still challenging! I wouldn’t say I have a strong player count preference, as a result.
Strategy
- Don’t rely on winning or losing tricks towards the end of the round. The end of the round is where things get the most volatile, in my opinion. You can see what cards are still in play, so you may have some sense of how you’re going to do, but you never know who will be forced to play what (and some players may choose to not play certain cards to mess with the ordering).
- If you have the 11 (9 in a three-player game), you’re very likely to win that trick. It’s worth knowing! It should influence your predictions, somewhat. You can do similar predicting for 10s, possibly, but if you’re forced to play one at an inopportune time it might change how you finish up.
- Keep an eye on which color is going to be the forced suit for a given round! That should inform your play. You want to plan ahead. Maybe you get rid of that suit so that you have better odds of placing lower, or you prioritize keeping high cards of that suit so you can win. See where you’re at.
- You can occasionally mess with other players’ plans, especially if you’re going last. Doing that is good. If you’re playing last, you can sometimes insert yourself at third place or intentionally throw off to go fourth to try and see if you can move a player out of the spot they were expecting to get. That might save you (or ruin them), but it’s tough to pull off.
- You might have some low-scoring rounds, especially if players are playing defensively. It’s very possible almost nobody makes their predictions until the very last few tricks, in which case, you shouldn’t expect a lot of points. When that happens, though, you’ll want to try and make sure that the other rounds aren’t particularly high-scoring, either (unless you’re the one getting tons of points) so that you’re not getting blown out by one lucky round.
- It’s usually a bit more difficult to predict second or third place than first or fourth. You can tell someone will likely win a trick with a high card or lose it with a low one (especially early, when everyone still has cards that they can be forced to play in that color), but you never know if a 6 or a 7 are going to pop in and end up being the second or third card. It’s just tough.
- You can try to mess with a player in the lead, but it’s difficult to do consistently. It really requires playing exact cards when they neither expect them nor are prepared for them, which may even be impossible some rounds! You might just not have the right cards for it.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Pretty compact! I do love these small box games; you can fit a ton of them in a bag or suitcase or whatever. There’s a lot to do!
- Setup doesn’t necessarily take too long, either. It’s mostly just shuffling and laying the appropriate cards in the appropriate places. For most trick-taking games, setup is pretty light, and I appreciate that.
- The order of the colors for each round can really change up how your predictions work. It’s fun! It’s another one of those games where your hand is not necessarily completely indicative of how you’re going to do in the round; you need to be able to predict how your opponents will play. But even then, the challenge remains pretty solid. It’s not just what people have, it’s what they play at any given time.
- I like the planning aspect! It’s a bit more in-depth than just your usual “I bid how many tricks I’m going to win”. I think having to predict where you’ll finish in the trick is particularly interesting. The challenge of it all is very fun.
- I also appreciate that you can’t necessarily mess with your opponents without a fairly nontrivial amount of work. It’s not impossible, which makes it even more fun (especially if you’re playing last in a particular trick), but it’s definitely difficult.
- The rounds can be pretty intense as players get close to completing their predictions. Once it’s down to a couple tokens left, players get intense. For one, now the strategy of it all has changed.
Mehs
- For a trick-taking game, a lot of table space is required. It’s really just the unfortunate alignment of a few different things since you’re essentially making a giant grid in the middle of the table. It just takes up a bunch of space.
Cons
- The graphic design doesn’t always gel with the theme. The box, for instance; it’s a skosh plain, and the cards have a similarly muted design. I think for a magical theme I expected a bit more pomp / circumstance / bombast, and while I find the muted theme has its own charm, I would have liked some pop to the cards.
Overall: 8.25 / 10
Overall, I think Seven Prophecies is a lot of fun! It appeals to my methodical and strategic Gamer Nature. I want to be able to plan and execute a strategy without a lot of interference from other players. Seven Prophecies manages to do that in a way that’s pretty interesting, given how aggressively interactive trick-taking games are by nature. It’s neat because winning tricks is only so much of your goal; you have to bet that you’ll lose some tricks, too (unless you have The Perfect Hand), and so, any move another player makes might not necessarily be to your detriment, if you have the right cards. There’s a certain level of trick-taking familiarity and strategy that Seven Prophecies demands in order for you to play well and do well, but that’s also pretty interesting. Like most bidding trick-taking games, I’d recommend not to play it with new players, but this in particular is going to be vexing to players without some familiarity with trick-taking. So that would just be … mean. Don’t do that. I do wish the game leaned into its magic theme a bit more aggressively, but that might just be stemming from a desire for more sincerely kitschy games. I want games that are garishly into magic, not necessarily offering me a muted, earth-toned palette. But oh well. If you’re looking for something a bit more directly aggressive and competitive, you might want to check out next week’s reviews. If you’re looking for a strategic trick-taking game, you enjoy executing on complex predictions, or you just want to bet big and risk it all, you’ll likely enjoy Seven Prophecies! I’ve had a lot of fun with it.
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