Sandbag card game review

We enjoy playing several trick-taking card games.

Our favorites over the years have been Skull King, The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, and Cat in the Box. That’s because they all present some very unique spins on basic trick-taking game play.

We’ve recently played a new trick-taking card game with unique twists that have us thinking in fresh ways yet again.

Sandbag, by Bezier Games, is a fun new spin on trick-taking card games that’s a lot of fun.

How to play Sandbag

For those unfamiliar with “trick-taking”, it’s a mechanic in games where all players play a card from their hand to the table and then one player claims the cards played. This is referred to as a “trick”. Games such as Hearts, Spades, Rook, Euchre, or Pinochle are trick-taking games.

The goal in Sandbag is to be the player with the fewest points after 3 rounds of play. Players gain points by taking “tricks”. Thus, the fewer tricks you take during the game, the fewer points you’ll gain.

The catch is that it can be hard to not take tricks over the course of a round.

There are 5 colored suits, numbered 0 to 10, as well as rocket cards that are negative points (a good thing in this game). When playing with 5 or 6 players, you’ll use the -7 points rocket cards and with 2 or 4 players, you’ll use the -5 point rocket cards.

Set up

To begin, players shuffle the deck and deal out all the cards face down to the players. After looking at their cards, each player chooses one card to pass to the player on their left and one card to the player on their right.

Next, each player chooses 3 cards to place in front of them. Two of the cards will be in their “basket” and 1 card will be below them as their “sandbag”. All are initially placed face down. Once everyone has placed their cards, they flip their two basket cards face up.

Playing

The starting player plays 1 card to the center of the table. They may play a card from their hand, or their face down Sandbag card, or a face up card from another player’s basket. The card they play will set the color for that trick.

Play continues with the player to their left playing a card. If they have at least one card of the led color, they must play that color (unless they swap – described later). If they don’t have a card of the led color, they may play any card.

Once all players have played a card to the center, they evaluate who takes the trick. The highest value card of the led color will take the trick unless a trump color card was played. In that case, the highest trump color card takes the trick.

Trump color

The trump color is determined by the face up cards in players’ baskets. The color that appears the most is trump for that trick. If there’s a tie in number of cards, the highest sum of the tied cards is trump. If there’s still a tie, all the tied cards are trump.

Thus, the trump color may change throughout a round and even within a single trick!

Sandbag

Another big twist in a game of Sandbag is that players have other options besides playing a card from their hand.

One such choice is to play their Sandbag card. This is the card face down below their basket. A player may play this face down to the center with the other cards in the trick. Since it’s face down, it isn’t a suit and thus will guarantee that player does not win the trick.

Swapping

The other option is to play a card from another player’s basket. Players may not play a card from their own basket, but can play a card from other players’ baskets.

To do so, they must swap a card from their hand with the card in the other player’s basket. They take and play the card from that player’s basket and place a card from their hand face down to that player’s basket.

However, as you might expect, there are particular rules on when you can swap a card from another player’s basket. Each player has a reference card that reminds them of these conditions. You may swap if:

You play first in the trick.
You take a card of the led color.
You have no cards of the led color.
You only have 1 card of the led color and you use that card to swap (thus you now have no cards of the led color in your hand).
You swap for a rocket card.

When a player wins a trick, they take the cards and place them in a face down pile in their area. If the trick included a rocket card, they place this face up in their area.

Play continues until all have played all their cards, including their sandbag card. The round ends and players total their scores.

Scoring

At the end of each round, players add up their points.

All facedown cards are 1 point. These include balloon cards taken in tricks as well as face down cards in their basket.
Any face up cards remaining in a player’s basket count as the face value. For example, if a player has a face up Blue 5 in their basket, they get 5 points.
Rocket cards are worth their face value of -5 or -7 points.

Players keep track of their points for each round. At the end of the third round, players add up all their points and the player with the fewest points wins!

Can the whole family enjoy Sandbag?

Sandbag is a fun trick-taking card game that families can enjoy playing together. Because of the unique twists in the game, we agree with the recommended age on the box of 10+. It’s not a game meant for younger kids (even with the fun balloon artwork).

Having played a lot of trick-taking card games, we feel pretty confident when tackling other such card games. That’s why we’ve love how Sandbag causes us to think differently.

Not being limited by just the cards you hold in your hand takes some getting used to. Looking for key opportunities of when to use a card from another player’s basket is essential for doing well. It totally mixes things up.

So does the realization that you can’t use any of the cards you put in your own basket. But rather the cards you put in your basket at the start of a round are for other players to use.

Since you want other players to win all the tricks, you don’t want to put out low cards in your basket and give them opportunities to swap for them and not take a trick. After all, having low cards in your hand will help you not win tricks. Why let your opponents use the low cards?

However, if the cards you put in your basket don’t get taken and used during the round, you’re going to be stuck with their face value in points. Which means you have a tricky choice to make at the start of every round on what to put out and what to keep in your hand. Plus, which cards you put in your basket will help determine the trump suit.

Also, the rocket cards are negative points and a good thing. So you’ll be tempted to keep them for yourself. However, having them in hand won’t do you much good because you can’t win a trick with them. So, if you have them in your hand, you’ll end up giving them out in a trick another person will win and thus give them negative points.

So you may want to put them in your basket. You may get lucky and when someone swaps out for the rocket in your basket to play in a trick, you then swoop in and win that trick. Oh, the joy of making such a move.

And oh, the choices!

That’s why we love Sandbag – there’s plenty of interesting choices to be made throughout.

Plus, there’s the factor of the trump color changing throughout a round and even during a single trick! You may start out with orange being the trump color because the most face up basket cards are orange. But then players swap out for those orange cards during a trick and before you know it, orange is no longer the trump color and someone else will unexpectedly win the trick with a card of the color of the new trump color. So fun when it happens to someone else.

We also like the catch-up element for those behind in scoring (which we didn’t explain before, but will now).

At the start of rounds 2 and 3, for every 10 points of a player’s total score, the player may place an extra sandbag in front of them. This means that if I’m at 21 points, I’ll first put out 2 cards in my basket and the mandatory face down sandbag card below them. But I’ll also get to put out 2 more face down sandbag cards. So during the round, I’ll be guaranteed not to win 3 of the tricks. Which also means other players will end that round with more tricks, and thus points.

It’s a cool element in the game that keeps things interesting into rounds 2 and 3 even if you’re behind.

We’ve played Sandbag with different numbers of players and have noticed the difference.

With just 3 players, you remove one full suit of cards. Yet, players will still have plenty of cards in hand. Which means more total tricks will be taken over the course of the game and total scores will be higher.

With a full 6 players, there will be less total tricks taken as the cards are further divided among all the players. Which means you may have better luck at getting by without taking a trick. Plus, there will be more face up cards in players baskets to pull from and more chances for the trump color to change unexpectedly.

Overall, we prefer playing at a higher player count because of those factors.

A last thing we’ll mention we like are the components. The artwork on the cards is great and the color suits also include a different shaped icon – which helps distinguish the suits for color-blind people. The inclusion of player aid cards for each player is fantastic. They’re great to use when introducing the game to new players as well as having on hand as reminders for all.

How does Sandbag score on our “Let’s Play Again” game meter?

Sandbag scores high on our “let’s play again” game meter because of the unique twists on a trick-taking card game. We like the new ways exercises our brains.

Like many similar games, the game play is quick. And with just 3 rounds in a game, it’s easy to play back to back games and get a new experience each time.

If we just have 3 players and want to play a trick-taking card game, we’ll probably choose a different one. But with 5 or 6 players, Sandbag is a gem.

We’d highly recommend grabbing a copy of Sandbag for your family!

The Board Game Family would like to thank Bezier Games for a review copy of Sandbag.