All-In: Predictions

Let’s play poker but in a different way. There has been several modern hobby games which make use of poker hands, e.g. The Gang. The good thing about these games is they use an aspect which most people are already familiar with. It will be easier for us gamers to convince our non gamer friends to try modern boardgames with us. 

Half of All-In: Predictions is actually playing poker, as in everyone is trying to make the best possible hand. The stronger your hand is, the more points you will score. The other half of the game is a betting game. You bet on who has the best hand. If your luck is poor and you are stuck with a weak hand, you can still score points by guessing the strongest player. 

When a round starts, everyone gets five cards. On your turn you play a card and use its power. Every card in the game has some powers, some mandatory and some optional. You use these powers to improve your hand and also to get information about your opponents’ hands. You can draw cards from the deck. You can take cards from a common pool. You have a hand limit of exactly five, and when you go over that, you must discard down to five. You can peek at an opponent’s cards. You can also ask an opponent what hand type he has, and he must answer truthfully. 

At the end of your turn, the card you play goes to the common pool. The round ends when the common pool reaches a certain number of cards. That number depends on player count. At the end of a round, everyone gets to guess who they think has the strongest hand. There is a prize to be won, and this increases from round to round. If multiple players guess right, you share the prize. Guessing the strongest is not always purely based on likelihood. The relative positions of the players can affect your pick. If the leading player is the only one making a particular guess, you know that if he is right he will win the full prize and it becomes even harder to catch up. So maybe you want to make the same guess so that if he is right, you’ll split the prize with him, slowing him down. If you are trailing, you might want to make a guess that no one else is making, with the hope that you win and take the reward by yourself. 

It is interesting how you can work towards a better hand. While you do that you want to pay attention to what cards your opponents have been taking and playing. You want to avoid playing cards to the common pool which they want. Also you want to be able to guess correctly who has the strongest hand. Card powers are shown on the two sides of the cards. In the photo above, the power of the Queen is you reveal three cards from the deck to pick one, discarding the rest. The King lets you draw 1 card, then ask one opponent which combo he has. 

The “All In” in the game title refers to one action you can do in the game. If you are confident you already have a strong hand and don’t need to take any more turns, you declare “All In”. What that means is you lock your hand and play no more cards for the rest of the round. Also no one else can peek at your cards any more. You add a card to the common pool now, and every subsequent turn you do it again. This speeds up the end of the round, putting pressure on your opponents. 

There is an advanced version of the game in which the poker hand ranking is modified. The full house is weaker while the straight is stronger. I suspect this should be the right way to play. Since the game is different from standard poker and player actions are involved in creating poker hands, the rarity of the poker hands will be different. 

I lied about this being like poker. This is a light strategy game that uses poker hands. You don’t bet or bluff. You have more control in what poker hand you eventually get.