I played this game a couple of times today. My overall opinion is that it was ok... the theme was great, but it just didn't quite work as well as I thought it should have done. As a result, it was a bit of a disappointment

The game starts with a queue of twelve nobles waiting to be guillotined. Each noble is worth a different amount, and the aim is to chop the heads off the ones that are worth the most. This is a great theme.

To aid the chopping of the best heads, each player has a range of action cards, which allow them to alter the order of the queue for the guillotine, or possibly alter the number of points they have directly.

You gradually chop the heads off all the nobles in the queue, until none remain. That's the end of "day 1". You then repeat this twice more, for a three-day game.

So far, the theme is great, and I'm seeing potential for a few simple strategies to make it interesting. But I was then disappointed by some of the features.

Here are a couple of problems I had with the game:


o) The cards that can kill off 33% of the game in one go.

Some of the nobles have special features, so that when you chop off their head, you get some sort of bonus. One of these has a special feature that when you chop off his head, the "day" ends. Since the game is three days long, ending one of the days means losing a good portion of the game.

As well as that noble, there is also an action card that says "end the day after my turn" which means that potentially, you could end two of the three days after one turn, and you've barely started the game by the time you've finished, with two thirds of the game being cut out.

Since this is a fun, and already short, game, it's a real disappointment when it's cut short like this.


o) The luck.

Too many of the cards revolve around luck. Some luck is fine - for a game like this, luck is good, because it means it gives people more of a chance to win. But too much luck stops it from being a game, and just makes it a lottery.

For example, there's an action card that allows you to re-order the line. But you can't choose how to reorder it, you just scoop the cards up, shuffle them, and put them back randomly. What should be an opportunity for a little tactic play just becomes an exercise in blind luck.


o) One action card at a time.

The action cards would work really nicely together. But the game lets you play only one at once. Instead of being able to use two cards to do something really cunning and amusing, you can only use one card, so you just do the one that works best on its own.

First, this means that it limits considerably the number of things you can do. For example, I had one card that added a noble to the back of the queue, and one that reversed the order of the queue. At the time, a really bad card was at the back of the queue. For a game like this, where so many of the cards are designed to screw over your opponents, I would have loved to have done:
1) Add nice noble to the end of the queue
2) Swap queue round, to take the nice noble, and leave the bad one ready for the next player.
As it was, only able to do one action, I just shunted an ok-ish noble to the front of the queue and took him. With the queue changing so much between turns, a two-turn strategic move is all but impossible, so you are forced to do moderately exciting short-term things.

Second, you end up with lots of action cards you can't use. I can have two great cards that cause annoyance and pain to my opponents, but because I are forced to play a boring card just to make sure I get an acceptable noble at the front, I can't then play my fun cards as well. Both times I played, I had cards left over that would have been great fun to play, but there wasn't the opportunity.


o) Too little risk-it-for-next-turn, or interesting, options

By this, I mean that almost always, the best card to play is one which causes the best noble to go to the front of the line, which you then take. Very rarely is the best strategy to use a card to re-sort the nobles, hoping that you have put them in an order that will help you next time.

There are a lot of action cards that allow you to shift a single noble forwards or backwards in the queue. So the best option is frequently to move the best noble to the front, so you can have it, or move the noble currently at the front further back, so you can have the one that was second in the queue. That's a bit dull, compared to cards that could allow you to make changes to the queue that would attempt to set you up for doing better next time.

Also, just moving one card forwards (so that you can take it) is not very exciting. It's just a card that let's you say "I'll have that one instead". I would like to have seen more that say you can swap a couple of cards over, or exchange some for ones in players' hands, or anything that means you're doing something that has more of a lasting effect on the queue for future players to deal with.


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So - on the plus side, it was great to chop off people's heads, and that theme was wonderful. Also on the plus side, I played a couple of games, and would happily have played another one.

But - on the negative side, there was really no strategy/tactics at all. As long as you have a vauge bit of sense, it's pretty obvious that one of your cards will do very well for you, and the others are less good. And since you can only play one card, you just play the one that's obviously best. There's less scope than I expected for screwing over your opponents at the same time as benefitting yourself, there's less scope for really awesome moves that are good fun to be able to play out, and in general, my brain just didn't have to be awake at all. I didn't want it to be working overtime, but just the need to be awake would have been nice.

For me, a similar game with a similarly silly theme, also with cards with good (even better) illustrations, also involving some killing, also simple to teach, and quick to play, but with just that added interest to keep me interested and awake, is Unexploded Cow. My recommendation would be avoid Guillotine, and buy Unexploded Cow instead. However, if you've already got Guillotine, then it's good enough to keep, and play once in a while. And maybe there's scope for a few house rules to be added to spice it up a bit and make it a little more interesting as a game as well as as a theme.