Skull

The quintessence of bluffing.

JorisL

Skull is a bluffing and deduction party-game, best played with 5 or 6 players. This write-up shows how this game can be played with a standard deck of cards, but I would also recommend to purchase the real game to support the desiner (and because of the beautiful astetics of the game).

The first player to with 2 bets, or the last player with any cards remaining, wins the game.

Setup

Each player gets 3 red-colored number cards, known as roses, and 1 black-colored face card (Jack, Queen, or King), known as skulls.

Choose a starting player.

Start of a round

At the start of a round, each player chooses one of their cards an places it face-down in front of them.

Player turns

On a players turn they can choose to either:

When a player makes a bet, they announce a number of cards they can reveal without encountering a skull. After a player has made a bet, no one can play any other cards. They can only choose to pass or raise the bet.

Betting continues untill all other players have passed; the highest bidder the attempts to reveal the declared number of cards.

Revealing cards

The highest bidder must reveal cards. They must first reveal cards from their own pile, after which they can reveal cards from the other players piles. When revealing a card, the top most card of the chosen pile is revealed; earlier played cards in a pile can only be revealed by first revealing the cards above.

If the bidder reveals a skull they stop immediatly. If the skull is in their own pile, they take back all of their cards (not yet lost in a previous round), and choose 1 card to remove. If the skull is in another players pile, they take back all of their cards, shuffle them with their hand cards, and let the player whose skull was encountered discard a card by random. Cards are removed from the game face-down, e.g. only the person whose card it was knows which one was removed.

If the bidder was able to reveal the declared number of cards without encountering a skull they get 1 point. Use a token (preferably a distinct object, but one of the non-used cards like Aces or Jokers also work) to show if a player has a point.

If the bidder wins the bid, they start the next round. Otherwise the round is started by the player whose skull was revealed (can also be the bidder).

Unrevealed cards are returned to their owners hand, without revealing them to the other players.

End of the game

Once a player acquires 2 points they win the game. Otherwise, if a player is the only player left with any cards they also win the game.

Closing words

See this video from Tom Scott for a nice gameplay example of this game.