There’s little more thrilling than taking a risky move and having it pay off in a big way. Good Face Bad Face is built entirely around that concept, with players literally stacking the deck in their own favour while also trying to secure a set of four good faces in their play area.
Good Face Bad Face is all about getting four Good Faces in your play area, however even one Bad Face can take you right back down to zero. It means that you can not only bust in one turn, but also go from absolute zero through to a win with one hand.
Its all done through with a deck of thirty cards that are split out between the 2-5 players, with more bad faces in play if there are more players (there are player-quantity specific distribution rules). The first player then takes their hand and makes it into a stack of cards that’ll be passed around the table from person to person.
Each player then has the choice whether to take the top card or pass. If they take the top card and its a good card then they can go again, continuing until they either win, pass or draw a bad card. Pretty simple, right? If there are enough cards left that the player who built the deck gets to hold them then they get to play through the deck too – so there’s a big danger in letting a player with a big deck build the hand and manage to wipe the other players out. Once the originator of the stack passes (and they must play at least one card) they can put the rest back in their hand — with dealing then passed to the next player.
So, if you get a bad card then it wipes out any good cards that you have in front of you, or it collects (with other bad faces) requiring good faces to clear. The only exception is when you have too many (three) bad faces in front of you, at which point they do purge down into your hand.
As you can see, it’s incredibly simple once you get going, and with that confidence comes the deception. You probably have at least some slight knowledge of the group of people you’re playing with and so you can load up your deck based on your expectations of them. If you know that the next player is generally trusting, why not kick the whole thing off with a red card? If nobody trusts you anymore then you could just stack four good faces up and let the other players serve you up a victory on a plate.
Good Face Bad Face is an incredibly easy game to learn, and does a great job of balancing deck-fixing with push your luck strategy.
Good Face Bad Face is available now from Amazon, and other board game retailers.
