A couple of weeks ago, I heard Brett Gilbert give a great talk at the London Educational Games Meetup Group about his board game design philosophy. He seemed to share a lot of my thoughts about what makes a good game, and we chatted afterwards about Divinare, soon to be his first published game. Coincidentally, last week I was offered the chance to try a pre-production version and so I thought I would give it a quick ‘first look’ review.

The basics
Divinare is a fairly simple 30-minute card game themed around a prediction contest between mediums in Victorian London. It was developed from a prototype called Oracle Pathway, which won the 2011 Granollers design contest in Spain. The main elements are partially shared information, bluffing and a little screwage. My five-word summary is “Advanced Liar’s Dice, without dice.”

Components

I played a pre-production version, so I can’t comment on the card-stock etc. but the artwork is gorgeous. Most important is a deck of 36 tarot-style cards (6, 8, 10 and 12 of four types).

There are also four boards (corresponding to the four suits) on which players will make their predictions and a bunch of tokens for making predictions and scoring.

Divinare is not a deeply thematic game but the artwork helps evoke the mood of a Victorian parlour. Each player is also given an ornately illustrated character card, plus back stories in the rulebook, but these have no game function other than as an aide de memoire for which prediction tokens belong to whom.

Gameplay
A 4-player game consists of four rounds, with each player starting once as turn order can be quite important. In each round, 24 cards are dealt equally between the players and 12 are left out unrevealed. The players will then attempt to correctly predict how many of each suit were dealt, just as players predict the number of communal dice of a certain value in Liar’s Dice.

Immediately before the start of the round, each player passes three cards to their right, so that all players have now seen 9 of the 24 cards. Players then take turns to place one card from their hand face-up next to its corresponding board, and must also make or alter their prediction of how many total cards of that suit are in circulation.

The trick that makes the game is that you can’t leave your prediction unchanged and only one player can occupy each prediction space. This means that you may end up being forced to change your prediction to something you’re pretty sure is wrong.

After each player has played two cards, they pass two more of their four remaining cards right. This is followed by two more card plays and corresponding prediction movements, a final pass of one card right, and then two more card plays each. By the end of the round, each player will have had 12 of the 24 cards in their hand, giving them information on which to base their predictions.

After all cards have been played, the predictions are scored. For each suit, a perfect prediction scores 3 points, while one space either side gains 1 point. All other predictions lose a point. In addition there are a few bonus spaces at the extremes of the prediction tracks, where both the risks and rewards are increased.

How does it feel to play?
The cleverness of the game is in the fact that the cards not only mediate information, but also constrain player actions. At first I thought I should choose the cards I passed mainly to limit the amount of information I passed on, for example by holding my three cards of the 6-card suit and passing one of the 10s and two of the 12s.

But particularly towards the end of the round, it becomes more important to pass a card because you don’t want to have to change your prediction on that board, or because you really do want your opponent to! This is where the screwage comes in, and it’s important to keep an eye on turn order. Because cards pass right but turn order is clockwise, you’re usually passing to the person who plays immediately before you.

The first few cards played in a round feel a little arbitrary, but as more and more are revealed the mood becomes tense, and it’s horribly painful to be forced to play a card that simultaneously makes your current prediction correct and forces you to change it!

Final thoughts
Divinare is smart and elegant - just as I'd expected from Brett's talk. It can be taught in two minutes and played in no more than half an hour. Turns are quick-fire as each player just chooses one card to play, but the choices feel tricky and significant, particularly towards the end of each round.

Together with the lovely artwork, this makes for an appealing package, of which no less a designer than Bruno Cathala has commented “After having played it, my first feeling was "WAOW !!! it should have been designed by Knizia at his best level !!!" I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of Brett’s designs in the future.