Poison

THE STORY

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has evolved over thousands of years, its practitioners use various psychological and/or physical approaches as well as herbal products to address health problems. Thanks to the devotion and consistent efforts of those TCM practitioners, over ten thousand kinds of herbs has been documented for their medical effects on health caring as well as disease treatment. As a TCM doctor, you are now tasked with distributing the herbs as the prescription instructed. However, your opponents aren’t about to idle around while you accumulate fame, as they will be distributing medical herbs of heir own and attempt to stuff poison in the herbs you have just prepared for your patients! At the end of the game, would you be able to excel all other doctors and grant yourself the famed title of Zai Shi Hua Tuo?

THE GAMEPLAY

POISON is a game designed by Doctor Reiner Knizia and published by Rawstone Games with new appealing artworks originated from TCM background integrated. In a round, every player gets a hand of herbal cards with the exact amount depending on the number of players. The herbal cards come with 3 suits (Red, Yellow and Blue) that have a value of 1-7 and a 4th wild suit(Grey, representing poison) always have a value of 4. On a player’s turn, he/she must play a herbal card from his/her hand into a pile of the herbal cards of appropriate suit, with the wild suit being playable into any pile. Then the player must give the sum of all herbal cards now in the pile, if the sum is greater than 13, he/she takes all herbal cards in the pile with him/her except the one he/she just played. The round ends when all herbal cards has been played. Then players compare the number of herbal cards in each suit (except the Grey suit) they have now, the player with the greatest amount of herbal cards in one of the three suits (Red, Yellow and Blue) discards all herbal cards with that suit. After that, player tally their penalty points with poison cards of the wild suit worth 2 points and all other herbal cards worth 1 point. Finally, the player with the fewest penalty points wins the game!