Designer: Reinhard Staupe

Artist: Alexander Bradley

Publisher: Playroom Entertainment

David and Goliath is a trick-taking game that has earned good vibes and come highly recommended by those who know the genre well. The problem is that the game is long out and print. This is really too bad since this game ended up as one of the top picks amongst the attendees of a recent trick-taking game night. There should be a line of publishers clamoring to reprint this game, but oddly, there is no one in sight.

David and Goliath is a conventional trick taker in a sense that it has very few tweaks or rules exception to the single-card trick taking mechanism. Each round, one player must play a card and all players must follow suit if possible. There are five suits, one of each color and if a player does not have a card of the lead suit, they are free to play any card. After all cards are played, they are evaluated based on the numerical advantage with the strongest number winning the trick. Ties are broken by the player who played last. This is the conventional trick taking aspect of the game. The twist in David and Goliath is that the weakest card will claim the strongest card. So, in a five player game, the person playing the weakest card will claim the strongest card, while the one playing the highest value card claims the remainder four cards.

After all cards in the hand are played, scoring is carried. During the scoring round, suits with two or fewer cards will earn the face value of the cards while suits with three cards or more will count as one point per card. So the goal here is to collect only two high-value cards of each suit to maximize scoring. Anything more and each card will count only 1 point to the final tally. Easier said than done. In reality, collecting more cards is fine. Instead of just aiming for two cards per suit, which is sometimes not feasible, the more the merrier in a way. In our games, folks who collect plenty for cards for each suit still came out with quite a respectable score. Of course, if you have two cards of high value for any one suit, picking up more should be avoided. But at times, it is quite hard to avoid that.

Final thoughts

Our game with six players was a blast. Play was fast because cards were laid down rapidly in succession, clockwise after the lead suit is played. Now, it is possible for the last few players of each trick to dictate who wins the trick by playing their high/low cards, and it is usually advantageous to go last, at least early in the game when cards in hand are still plentiful. There is plenty of meta gaming in David and Goliath. For one, it is delightful to “poison” the pools of cards in play to lower scoring for other players by forcing players to pick up more than two cards for each suit. This scoring options remind me a lot of 3 Sind Eine Zu Viel!, another card game which I love. The ease of play for David and Goliath coupled with the push your luck scoring matrix and the potential for backstabbing makes this an easy hit for many. I can see why this game goes well with the casual crowd but still has the ability to please the hobbyist. The fact that David and Goliath can play up to six is also a huge plus. Come on now, publishers, this is an easy no-brainer for a reprint.

Initial impression: Great!