Coyote

A wild coyote howls in the desert night, unnerving the few travellers sat around the campfire. They pause briefly before they carry on playing cards around the fire, shadows dancing between them joining the blackness behind. A few minutes pass, the game continues, slowly and silently a coyote slowly enters the ring of fire. It eyes up the huddled figures before moving right up to the fire. A slight pause follows before it sits back on it’s hind legs. The dealer sees the animal as he begins to shuffle the cards he just collected. “Well boys, looks like time to start bluffing” he says, dealing the cards out to each of his fellows, and giving a hand to the coyote too. No what about the board game, Coyote?

Taking A Look

If that makes sense to you then good. If not then it’s OK, the theme for the game is loosely based on North American history and stories and native Americans believing the Coyote to be an infamous trickster. But this is a bluffing game at heart and so is the theme really that important? Probably not.
If you managed to get hold of a copy of the previous game in the ‘series’, Spicy, then you’ll see a couple of similarities. You pick up the shiny box, open it and and gaze upon the wonderful gold foil backed cards inside before embarking on a game of bluffs. It’s wonderful to look at, although I do wonder how well these can hold up to over time, so far over a half dozen games they still look as good as ever, but the back of my mind considers ordering sleeves for them. The original forms of this game would have used cards stuck to the player’s foreheads, but Coyote comes with some plastic stands that can be used to hold the cards in front of each player around the table.

Trickster Time

So now, what is this game trying to bluff, and how is it different to what came before? The bluffing aspect of Coyote involves players bidding using hidden information, similar to Skull or Perudo if you’ve played these titles before, and as you go around the table each player is increasing the bid and trying to not go over the total value of cards on the table, or you can stop and challenge the current bid if you think a player has gone too high. So looking at the cards, this is how Coyote makes itself different from the rest. Each player has a card, and each player can see everyone else’s cards, but not their own. Add in an extra face down card in the middle and this gives all the hidden information that everyone needs to play around with.

There are only a small selection of numbers in the deck, but there are still enough to really swing the games either way and add to the player’s bluffing aspects. The main heart of the deck contains the cards 0 to 10, throws in a couple of larger ones also at 15 and 20, mixes in some red negative cards too, and then finishes off with a couple of blue special cards to mess with the total, adding random cards into the final number or negating the highest value. Everyone also has 3 Peek cards in front of them which double up, giving a player the option to flip one on their turn to peek at the face down card in the middle of the table, and then also being their lives tracker, losing one each time a round is lost. The peeking adds a bit more to the strategy of the game, and gives a bit more incentive for the risk of calling someone out, as the winner of a challenge gets to flip a used peek card back face up ready for the next round, a powerful tool when used at the right time.

Laughing And Howling

Coyote can provide moments with all the players chuckling around the table after the latest play, the last game in the final round I led the bidding at negative 20, staring at my opponent’s red card, and could only challenge as he increased the count to 1, revealing my 0 card and the secret face-down 1, costing him the game with the lowest bid of the night! There is a trickster variant included in the box, and whilst the pointing and guess aspect of it seemed confusing, it did have a nicer mechanic providing the previous round loser with an extra card allowing them to add and peak at a second mystery card no one else can see, making it less likely for a player to lose twice in a row, and with players being eliminated after losing all their lives it was nice to make it slightly less likely for players to lose twice in a row. The game round can play fairly quickly though, whenever the count doesn’t increase 1 number at a time, so early eliminations shouldn’t be sat out doing nothing for too long. But on the bright side eliminated players can gaze at the shiny cards as they peek at them and chuckle to themselves about how far away from the actual totals all the players are currently guessing.

Fans of bluffing games will easily find room on the shelves to fit the small box the game comes in, minimalists might even keep all the components in a small travel bag. And for those not really into it, well its not going to eat into too much gaming time and whether or not you win it’s still fun just to gather around the table and bluff like the Coyote.