Hit the Silk! First Impressions
Hit the Silk! sees you lie, cheat and steal your way to grabbing all of the money.
Just hope you managed to also snag a parachute!
It was always going to be a daring heist. Everything was going to plan until the pilot seized a gun from the lockbox, opened the emergency door and fired three rounds into the engine before bailing with his parachute and a spare!
You need to secure the loot but now you’re a parachute down on a plane that’s losing altitude. Fast. Who can you trust? Who’s got the cash? Where are the ‘chutes? Can you hold your nerve before you Hit the Silk!?
Hit the Silk! Game Play
This is a very loose description of gameplay but you’ll get the idea…
Players have a hand of cards and they can change one per turn, play any number of cards and trade with other players.
When changing a card you discard it and then reduce the altimeter by 500 feet. Then they draw the number of cards shown on the dial.
When playing cards from your hand, some of these will also reduce the altimeter too. These cards let you look at other players’ hands, steal from them etc. The handcuffs cuff you to another player but there is a key you can play to unlock them. The key also unlocks a lockbox with some additional cards in it.
There is a poison as well as an antidote as well as cards to shoot and punch players
Trading is just that, trading cards in hand. You can agree on what to trade and lie about which cards you’re passing, it’s up to you.
When it’s time to hit the silk, players with a parachute count their money cards and if they have the target amount between them they win.
If the parachutists don’t have enough they lose, if handcuffed players didn’t have enough parachute support, they lose and anyone that was killed also loses.
Anyone still on the plane has the chance to land it. If they do they compare their cash vs the total required vs the parachutist’s total and the team with the biggest surplus is the winner.
Theme
Trying to achieve a goal before an end-game point is always fun. Trying to grab the cash and a parachute before a plane crashes is also pretty good.
Funnily enough, I played this not long after I played Bahamas which is basically the same game.
Setup
It has one of those ‘get these cards, put some aside, shuffle others, add them in, put these separate and put the others face down.
Not to mention there is a different amount of cash in the game depending on the player count so these cards need to be fished out too.
Components & Artwork
The cards are standard, the art is unimpressive and the dial is confusing.
Ease of Teaching
The game is easy to teach, it doesn’t have many rules.
Hit the Silk! Summary
As you can probably tell I’m not really impressed with this game.
As I said, I played Bahamas not too long before this and it’s basically the same theme, same game but lighter to play making it feel more suitable for this kind of game.
I do like the negotiation part of this. People waiting to eject from the plane and trying to work out how much cash they have and if they’re worth taking them. Reminds me of the TV show Golden Balls.
Apart from that, I would rather play something with proper negotiation like a social deduction game.
Jesta ThaRogue
