Battle Chess Card Game: Fun Quick Game To Buy For Christmas

I am a big fan of card games that are easy to learn and quick to play. That is why I recommend Battle Chess as a great Christmas gift. As I mentioned in the introduction to this review, it's called Battle Chess but plays more like poker! Obviously with the recent poker craze this game is great for poker fans. It does have a little twist though, you only get to make 3 card hands!

The game board consists of 9 boxes for each player across from each other with a "stone" in between. The object is to capture either the most stones in the game when all the cards are played, or you can win earlier by winning three stones that are next to each other at any point in the game! How do you win stones? Well you build a better 3 card poker hand than your opponent.

As you can guess, playing three card hands is a little different. Some poker hands aren't possible. Here are the rankings of the possible hands: Straight flush, 3 of a kind, flush, straight, pair, high total for 3 cards. As you play your cards keep an eye on what has been played though, if you know for sure that there is no card your opponent can play to give them a better hand than your three card hand you have on the board you can claim the stone in front of that hand and your opponent can't play any more cards to that hand (this can stop him from throwing useless cards as the game goes on trying to buy time).

Now that I explained the strategy, how about how the game is played? Well everyone gets 9 cards to start, each time on your turn you draw one card and play one card to one of your hands. There is no discard pile in this game. You continue playing until one of several situations arise : If someone wins three stones next to each other, they win the game immediately, if it is impossible for anyone to get 3 stones in a row then if someone gets 5 stones the win (the most their opponenent can get is 4), finally all the cards are played (just in case you couldn't determine if anyone would get 3 stones in a row or win 5 stones until this point).

This is a great game for poker fans, and adds additional strategy to the game. Again, I'm not going to give all the strategy tips away, but it's a game at $12-$15 that is a must for any poker fan out there!