Skulls of Sedlec sees you build a pyramid of skulls.
Can you please everyone? (Even though they’re dead)
Sedlec Ossuary, 16th Century AD.
The Black Plague and Hussite Wars have overcrowded the graveyard. Help the Bone Collector, a half-blind monk, by exhuming graves and arranging the skulls inside the crypt.
You are novice monks, competing to create the best arrangement of skulls.
Skulls of Sedlec Game Play
Shuffle the 18 cards and make 6 piles of 3 face down, then turn one card on the top face up.
On a players turn they can either Dig, Collect or Stack.
To Dig, flip over any 2 cards and put one of them in your hand.
To Collect, take an already face-up card from the graveyard into your hand. There is a hand limit of just two cards so if you alreay have 2 cards you have to Stack
To Stack, put a card from your hand into your pyramid shaped tableauk. Cards must be placeced adjacent to other cards and on higher rows they must be above two cards.
When everyone has completed their stack which uses all the cards in the game, it ends and the player with the most points in the winner.
Each part of the card scores depending on what it does.
Peasants score 1 point each.
Royals score 1 point per Peasant on a lower row.
Priests score 2 points per unique level containing a Preist.
Criminals score 2 points if adjacent to a Priest
Romantics score 6 points per adjacent Romantic once each.
Theme
The theme is set in the Sedlac Ossuary which is a church in Czechia with 40,000 human skeletons so I guess some of them must be stacked on top of each other?
The scoring is themaic with Peasants just happy to be there while Royals want to be above the lower classes etc
Setup
Shuffle and put the cards in piles, job done!
Components & Artwork
The cards are cards…
The art is OK but the bright colours and clear symbols help with recognition of the different types of cards.
Ease of Teaching
The game is very easy and as MOST stuff is face-up throughout the game you can help out newer players. Even cards in hand aren’t drawn blind so it’s not exactly secret what players are holding.
Skulls of Sedlec Summary
I like tiny little card games like this and Love Letter that are simple to teach, are fun to play but also give you enough to think about. Not too much though! Don’t want a headache from a game like this.
I played this twice back to back and tried different ways of scoring. The first time I got a few priests and surrounded them with criminals. The next time I had a go at Royals, Peasants and Romantics. You know what? My scores were exactly the same.
Does that mean the game is well balance? Or does it mean that what ever you play it makes no difference? Well, the best pyramid wins either way.
There are quite a few expansions to change things up to so if these were available, I’d definately play it again.
Jesta ThaRogue