Base price: $20.
3 – 4 players.
Play time: 20 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 5
Full disclosure: A review copy of Idle Hands was provided by New Mill Industries.
I suppose, after thinking about it, Man-Eating House would have been the better pre-Halloween review. I used to do Spooky Games Week and review a bunch, but I’ve sort of fallen off that wagon lately; too many games to just do spooky ones during the spooky season. We will see if we can reclaim that next year, but I’ve been busy enough lately that I’m not optimistic. In the meantime, though, we’ve got another New Mill game here to check out, so let’s dig right into it!
In Idle Hands, you work for the devil, which may or may not resonate with you depending on how you feel about your real-life boss. (Canned laughter.) Regardless, he’s tasked you with participating in a contest to prove that you’re not lazy, or maybe he’s just being a jerk. Could go either way. These contests aren’t exactly “safe”, but your workplace doesn’t exactly have “OSHA”, either, so it mostly cancels out from his standpoint. Avoid the dangerous payloads, win big, and prove to the devil that you have what it takes to stay gainfully employed!
Contents
Setup
Not too bad. Shuffle up the cards:
Set some face-up in front of players to be their Starting Missions:
- 3 players: 3 cards each.
- 4 players: 2 cards each.
Note that there are some rules here: if you would draw a fifth card of one suit or a fifth negative card (4 / 8), set those aside and keep drawing. After doing that, shuffle set-aside cards back in and deal out cards to each player:
- 3 players: 10 cards each.
- 4 players: 8 cards each.
Each player chooses an additional card to place from their hand as an extra Mission, and you should be good to start! The last player to see the devil goes first.
Gameplay
This one’s not too bad; let’s see how much I can do from memory.
The core point is this: Don’t take 4s or 8s. They’re worth negative points.
To start a trick, the lead player chooses one of their Mission Cards and places it near the center of the table. That’s the led suit for this trick, as well. If they don’t have any more Mission Cards, they play whatever and the next player who can play a Mission Card plays it and then follows suit. If a player doesn’t have any cards of the Mission Card’s suit, they can play any card. The highest card of the Mission Suit wins; if no cards of the Mission Suit are played, the highest card wins.
Note that 1s and 10s are special cards: 1s always win if all cards in the trick are the same suit; 10s cannot win if any cards in the trick are not the same suit.
When a player wins a trick, they score all cards from the Mission in their score pile and take the Mission Card into their hand. They then start the next trick.
Once any player runs out of cards, the round ends. Players gain 1 point for each card in their hand, and then lose 4 or 8 points for any 4s or 8s (respectively) in their hands, Mission Card row (remaining), and / or score pile. The player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
Not a ton with this one; you’re just adding a new player to the trick-taking. Either way, there are still 12 Mission Cards between all players; you just get less control over the missions since you’ll only have three instead of four with four players. Beyond that, the gameplay doesn’t change much; just be careful for tricks where everyone throws negative cards on you; you’ll lose more points with more players like that.
Strategy
- It’s probably a good idea to try to have fewer cards in your hand of the Mission Card suit, or lower values. If you have high values in hand of the Mission Card, you’re likely to win the trick and have to take the card into your hand, which means you’ll have to potentially play that color again in the future. If you know what your opponent’s cards are, you can figure out how to mess with them, so be careful
- 10s become more useful later in the game when you can be pretty sure all players don’t have the same suit. Early-on, they win pretty handily. They’re high-value and every player usually has one card of each suit, at least. Holding on to them for a while is nice, though, as a way to get out of that cycle.
- I mean, you don’t particularly need to care who you dump your negative cards on. Anyone but you is fine!
- Winning tricks is technically good, in that having more cards in hand is worth points, but it’s almost always outstripped by the large negatives that come with taking either 4s or 8s. You get one point for every card in your hand at the end of a round, but you lose a lot more than that if you take a 4 and an 8 in one trick. So having more cards that you’ve won is good (since you get a Mission Card each time, so your hand size stays the same), but there’s almost no way you do that without taking a ton of negative points and cancelling it out.
- You can get stuck pretty easily, where you may have trouble avoiding winning tricks. If you keep taking high-value Mission Cards, other players can just throw off or play low and force out your high cards so you can keep winning everyone else’se 4s / 8s.
- 1s are pretty risky! They’ll win, but you’ll likely end up with a 4 or an 8 if you’re not careful. They’re fine in the mid-to-late game since you will likely have more than one suit in play, but if you have only other suits in play, the 1 of the led suit wins,
- Throwing off in a suit doesn’t necessarily mean you’re safe, especially if players have lower cards. Similarly, highest card wins if none of the cards match the led suit, so if you throw off a high-value card (a useful strategy in other trick-taking games), other players may play low in the hopes that you get stuck winning. This is particularly dangerous when you throw off an 8.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The art style is pretty cute on this one. It’s a bit of a chibi kinda vague-horror style. Wouldn’t call it spooky or even creepy, but just within the range of a horror aesthetic. I like it!
- I appreciate the portability of these games; as I mentioned last week, you can definitely fit a second trick-taking game in there. These are good boxes for transport reasons.
- A round plays pretty fast, which is always nice. It’s just a few tricks, some score calculation, and then onto the next one.
- It would be interesting to see how other special power cards would work in a game like this. I like the abilities of the 1 and the 10, and I’d love to see how other cards could potentially shake things up.
- I like the Mission Cards, and I like that the winner takes the Mission Card back into their hand each trick. It can really mess you up if you suddenly get stuck with the wrong card before you have to lead your next trick, and if players conspire, they can keep you in a loop where you win most of the tricks. It’s a little funny, but it’s worth being careful about. I like, though, that the Mission Cards give you a bit of a sense of what’s coming.
Mehs
- I think the boxes need to start having those notches that make it easier to pull the box bottom out. There’s a lot of rattling required to get the box bottom out of the box; it’s a texture thing with how the box was manufactured, I guess, but it’s still a bit irritating.
- It’s a bit weird that everyone ends up with negative scores in most cases. Just odd! It makes you feel like you’ve missed something.
- Another “play a number of rounds equal to the number of players”. Even though they like the game, I have a lot of trouble getting four people to commit to four rounds of the same game in one sitting, so I’ve always disliked this rule in card games.
Cons
- The 6s and 9s look decently similar when you’re looking at the cards upside down; making that clearer would help. Just a dot or something would go a long way.
Overall: 7.5 / 10
Overall, I think Idle Hands is fun! It’s still a game that I’m genuinely terrible at, granted, but I just like winning tricks too much. Then I get stuck with a bunch of cards of one color for a trick and I get stuck with more negative points, again. I’m trying to lose; it’s just not taking. Well, I’m losing the game; it’s the tricks I can’t shake. I think that’s kind of fun, though I understand why you need to have more rounds per game, then: you make a mistake, get cooked, and then you need to see if you have any hope of winning the game. If it happens twice, you don’t, but you could still try to see where you end up in the points allotment. It’s definitely an unforgiving game, but I’m not sure I’d call it tough. Cognitively, it’s pretty straightforward, and you even get a preview of what suits other players are going to lead via their Mission Cards. That can be pretty helpful. Cute game, and perfect for spooky season. If you’re a trick-taking fan, you enjoy fun art, or you just want to do a bit more work for the devil, I’d recommend Idle Hands! It’s been fun.
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