SNEAKY BASTARD
Publisher: 999Games | Design: Yonatan Mantzur | Ages: 12-99 | Players: 2-6 | Playing time: 30 min.
Links: Review 1 | Review 2 | Review 3 | Review 4 | BoardGameGeek
You finally want to buy a real house, because rent prices are skyrocketing. You have saved some money and were able to borrow some from your parents, but the bank and the mortgage lender are not very cooperative. And that middleman and that real estate agent also seem to have a double agenda. The housing market is deranged! Way too high prices for… what are you buying? You have to make an offer and before you know it, that house is yours. But which sneaky bastard ran off with your money? And what did you actually buy? Maybe you can still sell that house?
Sneaky Bastard is a highly tactical card game with no luck factor, in which you have to be clever with your money to buy the right houses. And if sneaky bastards come into play? Then you’ll need to influence, argue, manipulate…, and as it turns out not all players will make rational choices…
Game rules
Sneaky Bastard is a bidding game, where each round a house is put up for auction. The player with the highest bid gets the house, the remaining players take their money back. The highest bid is discarded, unless one or more players have played a sneaky bastard; then the highest bid goes to the player with the sneaky bastard, or to the player whose sneaky bastard outbid the other sneaky bastards.
So in some rounds, two auctions run at the same time: while some players are still bidding against each other over a house, other players might bid against each other to steal the as-of-yet unknown highest bid. At the end of the game, money is worth nothing, and only the values of the obtained houses count.
However, money is scarce and is slowly disappearing from the game. Fortunately, acquired houses may be used again at their asking price value as part of a bid to buy other (more expensive) houses. However, if there are houses included in the players’ bids, then the sneaky bastards can just run off with some points…