Off With Their Heads! – Don’t Go Mad And Keep Your Head!

If you want to keep your head firmly attached to your shoulders, you’ll need to play your cards just right and mark the right spots in Off With Their Heads! This unique game combines trick-taking sensibilities with flip-and-write mechanics.

Off With Their Heads! is for 2-4 players, ages 14+, and plays in 30 minutes. It was designed by JB Howell and Michael Mihealsick, and it is published by Druid City Games.

Setup

Each player takes a playing sheet and a pencil. Place the Wonderland board showing the four suits of cards in the middle of the table. Place the Queen standee on the Heart suit space.

Shuffle the deck of cards and deal nine cards to each player, then put the deck near the Wonderland board.

Gameplay

Off With Their Heads! plays over the course of three rounds. Each round has seven ‘Bouts’ (tricks). The Queen always indicates which suit is currently trump; the game starts with Hearts being trump.

Players select and play one of their nine cards face down. Players reveal simultaneously. Cards are ranked by suit and number value, starting with the current trump suit and following the order on the Wonderland board.

Then, players use their card color and value to mark an open spot on their player sheets. After each Bout the Queen moves clockwise on the Wonderland board, changing the trump suit.

Less than a Full Deck

If you play with three players, you’ll flip the top card of the draw deck face up when you start a Bout. If you’re playing with two players, flip the top card face up and place a second card face down. These cards help determine high, middle, and low ranks. They do not result in any extra marks being made on a play sheet. Otherwise, play continues as above.

The Player Sheet

While the card play is how the game moves forward in Off With Their Heads!, the player sheet is the (ahem) Heart of the game.

The sheet is split into three sections: The Meadow (top section), the Woods (the middle), and the Keep (the bottom).

The Meadow

The Meadow has five Mushrooms: Two red, two black, and the middle Mushroom is both.

If you played the highest-ranked card, you mark a spot in the Meadow matching the color of the card. You have to mark numbers from left to right in a Mushroom, and you cannot put the same number in the same Mushroom twice.

At the end of the game, you will get points for each completed Mushroom based on the value shown. Any incomplete Mushroom will not score.

The Woods

The Woods is full of 18 trees, some red, some black, and some mixed. If you played a card that ranked in the middle, you’ll mark a spot in the Woods. You can mark anywhere (matching the color of your card, of course), but you get bonus points if you don’t play the same number twice in a row anywhere in that section. Your goal is to surround the scoring marks properly to increase your score. You also get a bonus for filling in all 18 Woods spots.

The Keep

The Keep has two entrances. Unsurprisingly, one is red and one black. If you played the lowest card, you’ll mark a spot matching the color with the number of your card in the Keep. You must play adjacent to a previously-played mark (or at the start if you haven’t marked that color yet).

You score based on the marks you make in the spots marked with a gold wreath. If you mark the Red Keep in the middle, you gain two extra points and get to mark any color and number you want in both the Meadow and the Woods. These do not need to match each other or the mark you made in the Red Keep.

Special Icons

There are two special icons you can find on the player sheet: the Biscuit and the Teacup. When you mark a spot with a Biscuit, you immediately mark the same number in the same color in a different section on your player sheet. When you mark a spot with a Teacup, you simply make a slash in an unmarked Teacup on the right side of your player sheet. You can choose to use a marked Teacup at any point to either switch the color of your mark or mark the same number in a different section.

And yes, if you have enough teacups, you can switch the color AND mark in a different section.

The Tea Party

It wouldn’t be a game set in the Wonderland universe without all the members of the Tea Party, would it? You can find the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, the White Rabbit, Humpty Dumpty, the Dormouse, the March Hare, and the Mad Hatter scattered around your player sheet. Each party member has a specific set of conditions you need to meet in order to recruit them.

The Poker Hand

But, if each round is played over seven Bouts but players have nine cards, what happens to the other two cards? The final mechanic of Off With Their Heads! is a modified version of poker, complete with its own unique ranking system for the best hand. Each round, you’ll set aside two of your nine cards to try and craft the best hand of five cards.

End Of Game and Scoring

The game ends after completing the seventh Bout of the third round.

Players then reveal the poker hand they’ve made over three rounds and score them based on the score card (the back of the Reference card). Then players will sum their scores in each of the sections, plus unlocked Tea Party members based on the score chart on the player sheets, and add all their scores up. The highest score wins, and the losers meet the Queen’s axe!

In the event of a tie, the best Poker hand wins, breaking ties based on Hearts as the trump suit.

Impressions

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to make of Off With Their Heads! when I first cracked into it. It feels like the board game world has been flooded with trick-taking games, and I thought that would be the main focus here.

And while trick-taking is kind of important here, you’re only trying to actually win the trick if you want to make a mark in the Meadow. There is so much more to Off With Their Heads! than a standard trick-taking game.

I’ve taken to calling it a “trick-and-write” game. The writing part is so much more central to this game than the trick-taking aspect. You’re simply using the cards to try and make marks where you want to.

Using trick-taking mechanics to select where you make a mark adds a high degree of randomness. However, Off With Their Heads! built mitigation in through the usage of Biscuits and Teacups.

The poker element at the end of the game was simultaneously frustrating and really entertaining. The first time I took my hand each round, I looked for the two best cards to build that hand. It was frustrating when I didn’t get what I wanted, but it was a unique and fun throughline.

The player sheets might be the most impressive part of the game. Not only do they look crazy, befitting a game set in Wonderland, but all the essential information you need to play the game is there. How do I unlock Tea Party members? There are icons next to each one of them to remind you. The scoring is all there. The special rules for each section are there. However, that can be a bit overwhelming at first.

Off With Their Heads! is a fantastic and unique puzzle to solve. It can be frustrating when you just can’t make the mark you want, but that’s the game! The artwork on the cards and the player sheets matches Wonderland’s War, also from Druid City Games, and is creative and beautiful, in a mad way, one might even say. We enjoyed it each time we played.

You can get your own copy of Off With Their Heads! directly from Druid City Games/AllPlay, on Amazon, or from your friendly local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a promotional copy of Off With Their Heads! from Druid City Games for this review.

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