Base price: $20.
3 – 5 players.
Play time: ~10 minutes per round.
BGG Link
Pre-order!
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A preview copy of The Icarus Club 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 Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
We’re back with more trick-taking! I do kinda think that this is the genre du joir for a little while. There’s a lot of games coming out in the space that play with the genre, and I love it. I’ll be interested to see if that holds out in the long-term, but in the short term it does seem like players are getting into it. We’ve got another one from New Mill Industries, this week. It’s The Icarus Club! Let’s dive in.
The Icarus Club is a spot known to many, but not all. The ones that do know that this underground casino is a special spot where the night’s top roller gets to choose what game is played later in the schedule. Jut be careful! Win too much, and the house will take their cut: everything you’ve won! So you need to balance getting enough to keep yourself comfortable without attracting some unwanted attention. Will you fly high in this underground casino? Or will you risk it all and go too close to the sun?
Contents
Setup
Setup depends a bit on player count. For three players, you’re going to remove one suit from the game. Then, for three or four players, you’re going to make four / five face-down piles of eleven cards:
For five players, make six piles of nine cards and then remove the last one from the game. Each player gets to take a pile of their choice. The remaining pile is flipped face-up and laid out horizontally to form what’s going to be called the lane. You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
A game of The Icarus Club is played over several rounds (one round per player). During each, players participate in a trick-taking game where the goal is to not end up with the most cards. If you do, you get thrown out and you score nothing.
To start a trick, look to the lane. The leftmost card indicates which suit you must play, if you have it. Like other trick-taking games, if you don’t, you can play any card, but the highest card of the led suit wins. The player who won the trick gets to keep the card from the lane and any cards below it, but first, they must choose one card from the trick and place it on top of any subsequent card in the lane, changing the lane’s card for that trick. You can place on top of cards already placed on top of cards in the lane; no big deal. The player keeps the other cards and then leads the next trick.
Play continues until the last trick is won. Then, players count their won cards. The player(s) with the most cards score 0 points, oof. All other players record their scores. Take the cards, shuffle them up, and go again until the final round has been played. The player who scored 0 leads the next round. The player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
This is a pretty intensely interactive game! Players are changing the required suit of the subsequent tricks as they aggressively vie for second place, and relying on getting any particular place can change at any time, especially if you’re doing a “win X tricks and then start losing” strategy. What happens if all the other players split the difference? You’re in trouble, is what happens. There’s a lot of dynamic play at that level, so with more players, you necessarily invite more chaos. That’s the way of the world, I think. With fewer players, however, there’s still a lot of chaos. It’s a chaotic game. I think it actually manages to even out that chaos with player count, though, since you’re still messing with everything all the time regardless of player count, which is kind of refreshing. To that end, no major player count preferences.
Strategy
- Careful when you decide to start winning tricks. Once you start, it can be a bit difficult to stop. Not ideal. The worry is that as the round progresses, it’s more difficult to rely on players to have certain cards of certain suits so that they can take tricks from you. That said, if you’re keeping track of what cards have been played, you can potentially make it work.
- Keep track of what other players are playing and of what’s been played, if you can. Like I said, you need to know if it’s possible for another player to take the trick. At five players, there’s a card missing, so don’t necessarily rely on one perfect card, but otherwise, you might be able to use that to your advantage! Just, also, remember that there are cards that have been played (and buried) in the lane.
- Try to stick someone else with first place. You don’t want to score the most in either the round or the game, so … don’t do that.
- Players will dogpile you to stick you with first place if they can. Be warned. Skull King can do this as well, but you can see a lot of player notice one player is taking too many cards, and once one player shows any weakness, there’s absolutely no point in helping them. Might as well goof them while you can.
- At some level, getting something is better than getting nothing. This seems vacuously true, but still. Even if you can’t score a ton of points in one round, you’re essentially guaranteed that one player (at least!) is going to get 0. I wouldn’t bet on multiple players scoring 0, but, either way, 0 is less than everything else, so if you can get something, you’ll at least beat one other player.
- Choosing what the lead suit is going to be is nice, but it’s also a way to stick other players with more cards (or take some for yourself). One other thing you can do is obfuscate what cards are available by covering up a bunch of them. You should keep an eye on those piles, though, since you take all the cards in the pile when you win the trick.
- You may not always want to modify the immediate next suit. If you’re trying to take tricks, don’t mess with a good thing unless you need to. Plus, if you keep taking and modifying, you’re just accruing more cards rapidly. Sometimes it’s better to throw everything onto the last trick and make it extremely dangerous for any player to get stuck with them.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The player interaction in this is so interesting! You’re not necessarily directly engaging (beyond the trick-taking aspect), so you need to play a bit more of a sinister game by setting your opponents up for failure with too many (or too few!) cards. Add in that the overall winner busts at the end of the game and you’ve got trouble.
- I like the theme of a like, sinister hidden casino. It’s fun! It’s a great place for a mystery or escape room game, granted, but I also like that you’re actually playing within the rules of how the club operates. Plus, anything Icarian, by nature, really appeals to me. But I’m a weirdo like that.
- I also appreciate that by the time you really understand the meaning of The Icarus Club, it’s much too late. You flew too close to the sun! Congratulations! You lose! I do love that, though. It makes the game feel more authentic and dangerous.
- Very portable! New Mill has done a good job with the box sizes, here. Or you can just throw it in a Quiver or something.
- This is a nice contrast with Seven Prophecies, which has a similar intent and vibe but is significantly less interactive. That one is much more strategic in nature and this one is more tactical! You’re doing a lot more back
- There’s a nice complexity to the strategy, here, which I enjoy. You can’t really plan too much, so I suppose strategy isn’t quite the right word, here. Like I said, this is a highly tactical trick-taking game. You need to be focused, on the ball, and then it all goes to hell because you played exactly one wrong card once. Whoops! It’s tough to find a good balance of scoring well without overscoring both within the round and within the game itself.
Mehs
- It’s another one of those games where I always feel like playing one round per player is a lot. Here, it at least makes more sense because there’s the persistent threat of overscoring and busting for the entire game, but it can still be a lot, sometimes. You’ll get used to it, I suppose.
- This is another one that I probably wouldn’t recommend for players new to trick-taking. Having to deal with avoiding taking too many tricks and setting the lead suit for subsequent rounds is a lot to deal with all at once. It’s one of those things that you want to take in stages. For experienced players, though, this can get pretty cutthroat and intense, which is a lot of fun.
Cons
- I like the card art, but it’s not clear to new players which suit is which. I mean, you can tell them apart for the most part (though the strong black elements really kind of strongarm the other colors), but it’s sometimes hard to connect the abstractness of the suits to the actual things they represent. It’s not a huge deal, I suppose, but it being clearer would have been nice.
Overall: 8 / 10
Overall, I think The Icarus Club is a lot of fun! Like I said, pretty much any Icarian theme appeals to me, but overlaying it on a spooky and sinister casino is a lot of fun to boot! It’s a good vibe. It’s definitely on the more challenging end of the trick-taking spectrum (for standard trick-taking games), since it’s a lot of managing how you score and when you score so you don’t score too much. It’s a lot at once, but if you enjoy playing tactical trick-taking games and trying to surreptitiously undermine your opponents, this will definitely be up your alley! You’re not just planning your own moves, but you also need to try and find a fall guy to take the most tricks so that you can still score points. I’m still not a fan of the “one round per player” style games, though I understand that these are partially designed to make the game 1) a bit longer and 2) a bit more fair, as the cards can be pretty random at times. It works for me, but I’m also fine just playing a single round and being like “good job, team”. It’s fun either way. I love a bit of trick-taking, though, so this is right up my alley. It’s a nice pairing with Seven Prophecies since both rely on your ability to predict how and when you’ll take tricks and play cards, though their implementation is pretty different. If you’re into that, or you want to try mixing it up with tactical trick-taking, or you just want to run the casino some day, I’d recommend The Icarus Club! I enjoyed it quite a bit.
If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!