The Bottle Imp (or ''Flaschenteufel'') is a

trick-taking A trick-taking game is a card or tile-based game in which play of a ''hand'' centers on a series of finite rounds or units of play, called ''tricks'', which are each evaluated to determine a winner or ''taker'' of that trick. The object of such g ...

card game designed by Günter Cornett and based on the Robert Louis Stevenson short story ''

The Bottle Imp "The Bottle Imp" is an 1891 short story by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson usually found in the short story collection ''Island Nights' Entertainments''. It was first published in the '' New York Herald'' (February–March 1891) and ...

''. It was first published in 1995 by Bambus Spieleverlag, and was re-released by

Z-Man Games Z-Man Games is an American board game company, incorporated in 1999. It was named after its founder, Zev Shlasinger. The company is known for their ''Pandemic'' series of board games, as well as being the sole publisher for the English editions of ...

in 2010 under the name "Bottle Imp." It was re-published again by Stronghold Games in 2018.

Rules

The game is played with a bottle token and a proprietary deck of thirty-seven cards with a

total order In mathematics, a total or linear order is a partial order in which any two elements are comparable. That is, a total order is a binary relation \leq on some set X, which satisfies the following for all a, b and c in X: # a \leq a ( reflexive) ...

ing from 1 to 37. A card will be one of three colors which act like suits and there is no

trump Trump most commonly refers to: * Donald Trump (born 1946), 45th president of the United States (2017–2021) * Trump (card games), any playing card given an ad-hoc high rank Trump may also refer to: Businesses and organizations * Donald J. T ...

. At the beginning of the game, the token is not attached to any player. Card #19 is the price of the bottle. The rest of the cards are dealt out equally to all players. After hands are dealt, each player discards one card, passes one card left and one card right. The player to the left of the dealer leads the first trick. Players must play a matching color card if they have one, otherwise they may play any card. If a trick contains no cards lower than the price of the bottle then the highest card takes the trick. If a trick contains a card lower than the price of the bottle, then the highest card lower than the price takes the trick. That player gets the bottle token and the card used to win the trick becomes the new price. Tricks are led by the winner of the previous trick. Players keep the cards won in tricks. Cards used to "purchase" the bottle are returned to the player who played them when a new price is set. Play continues until all cards are played. At the end of the round, players who do not have the bottle score the face value of all cards they won. The player who ends the round with the bottle loses the sum of the cards discarded at the beginning of play. Play continues until a player reaches 500 points total. The element of the bottle determines much of the strategy in the game: since it is harder to get rid of the bottle at a lower value than at a higher one, players will generally try to get rid of their lowest cards early on in the game when there is a better chance that someone else will play a higher card that is still lower than the bottle's value.

References

External links

* {{Trick-taking card games Adaptations of works by Robert Louis Stevenson Dedicated deck card games Trick-taking card games