Intro

The short and sweet version of this review is that undercut is a quick, but
different, auction game that provides some tense decisions.

Mechanics

I am not going to cover all of the rules here, as they are easily available
online. The general idea is that you are bidding with pyramids in order to
buy "trees" of pyramids while attempting to avoid collecting different types
of sets of pyramids. Collecting a set will score points. Worse yet,
collecting a set will score more points (points are bad) than the last set
of that type collected.

Sets are:

trees: three pryamids of the same color in all three sizes
triplets: three pyramids of the same size and color (identical)
foursomes: four pyramids of the same size but different colors

The number of trees (with random colors) available for bid is one less than
the number of players. Bids are counted by pip count. Until all trees have
a bid, players must bid. Players may underbid each other by bidding less
than another player for a tree. The underbid player then must bid on
something else when his turn comes around again.

However, once all of the trees have a bid, the player without an active bid
may pass and simply draw a pyramid from a bag. He gets to choose the size,
but not the color, of the random pyramid.

Once a player has drawn from the bag, the other players take the trees they
"won" into their personal stacks and place the pyramids they bid with back
into the bag.

Starting with the current start player, each player returns any scoring
sets they have to the bags, accumulating the current point value of that set.
as one player has ten or more points, the game is over and the player with
the fewest points wins.

Gameplay

The tension in this game comes from trying to figure out what you can bid
and get away with while trying to both avoid scoring points yourself and
also trying to cause your opponents to score points.

This works well in the endgame, but I found the first part of the game to be
lacking, as we would generally bid down to two pyramids for a tree and then
someone would draw one pyramid. This meant that the net gain of pyramids
per player was only one per turn. It took quite a while to get to the point
where gaining that one pyramid was actually risky to a player.

After this first game, we started fiddling with the rules a little to try to
accelerate the tension building. Our first effort was to require drawing
two pyramids instead of just one. This works fairly well in causing the
pace of the game to increase, but it causes the end game to be a little more
random because a player has two chances to draw something bad at random.

We have also considered starting with twice as many points in pyramids or
requiring a random draw of at least three points in pyramids instead of a
fixed number of pyramids.

Conclusion

Pros

Interesting alternative to "normal" bidding games
Nice tension in the endgame
Medium game length (30-45 minutes)


Cons

Getting to the endgame can be a little slow (with the original rules)
The random pyramid draw, both for not winning a bid and for the trees to bid
on, can be a little frustrating


If you have access to five icehouse stashes and have an interest in a
different kind of auction game that has some nice tension, I recommend
trying Undercut. I would also recommend experimenting with a few
variants to help keep the game moving along.

I would not recommend buying Icehouse Pyramids just for this game. I would recommend buying them for Zendo. Once you have them, however, you should try Undercut.