By Sean Winningham

on October 26, 2023

Critical Role, the group of voice actors who launched into fame with its Actual Play Twitch streams of Dungeons & Dragons, is currently in its third campaign featuring the party called Bells Hells. Their publishing arm, Darrington Press, just released a new card game inspired by this campaign called Caper Cards.

Here’s the official description of the game from Darrington Press:

In this cooperative card game, assemble the Bells Hells adventuring party of Critical Role Campaign 3 to pull off a daring heist. You’ll aim to play your Crew cards strategically as a team, hoping to exceed the value of the treasure you’re pursuing without going over 21. Each Crew card bears gorgeous art of the teammate, the card’s numerical value, and an ability, such as Chetney’s ability to be played as either a 6 or a 9. Play is quick, with gameplay lasting around 20 minutes, and you can play it with up to 4 players, including a solo mode.

GAME INFORMATION

Players: 1-4
Play Time: 15-30 minutes
Ages: 12+
Mechanism: Cooperative, Card Game, Deduction, Blackjack style
Genre: Fantasy, Heist
Designer(s): Manny Vega
Artist(s): David Rodriguez, Matt Paquette & Co.
Publisher: Darrington Press

REVIEW

How It’s Played

The goal of the game is that you and your party need to collect treasures by completing heists. You need to collect 4 in a row (5 if you’re playing solo or 2 people) in order to win. If you lose even one heist, your party loses the game.

To complete a heist, each member of your party needs to play a card from your hand strategically for a total of four cards. Each card has a number on it, plus a special ability that can affect the game and/or your party score (and each card represents a member of the Bells Hells party!). The catch – you cannot tell your party what card you have in your hand or what you’re going to play.

After the party plays their hand, you combine your score. Then, you reveal the treasure and place it on top of the Risk card which has a score of 11 (or 12 if you want to play a more challenging game. The Heist score is the Risk score plus the Treasure score combined. If your party’s score meets or exceeds the Heist score without going over 21, your team wins that treasure and you complete the heist!

At the end of each heist you’ve completed, you place the treasure card under the risk card and reveal the condition on the bottom of the treasure card so the party can see it. The condition affects the next heist, which makes it more challenging. By the time you get to the 4th heist, you’ll have 3 conditions you have to play.

The Playing Experience

This game was actually very quick and easy to learn and play. It took about 5-10 minutes to read and learn the instructions, the play is pretty straightforward, and it was easy getting the game started. I actually did this and taught my wife how to play the game during our lunch break and got two games in (we only took 30 minutes for lunch), and we enjoyed how easy it was to just be able to jump in and play.

As we played, we realized there was a lot of strategy and deduction involved in trying to win, especially since one failure means you lose the game. So after playing the first time (and lost), we figured out what we needed to keep in mind and think through before starting the second game. The second game was more successful but every time we won a heist, the next round got more challenging not only in trying to complete the heist but you had different conditions and modifiers that would affect your score, so the strategy wasn’t the same for each round. By the time we got to the final heist, we had to point out what the score was every time we played a card to make sure we were able to succeed. We won the second game, by the way!

Artwork

One of the elements of this card that struck me right away was the artwork and design of the cards. The art by David Rodriguez is mesmerizing that I could look at the cards and not play the game if I wanted to. Rodriguez captures the characters in a very engaging and exciting way that reminds you of what you see in a comic book or anime. The colors are bright and beautiful, and it doesn’t get in the way of the functionality of the cards for play. One of the art styles uses monochromatic coloring for its character/hand cards (meaning each card uses various shades and lighting of a single color, such as green or yellow), and it works really well for this game. In all, I love this style and hope to see more art like this from Rodriguez in the future.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I was really surprised how such a simple game was so challenging. This is a great game if you’re looking for something that is fun, challenging, quick, and portable, especially if you’re a fan of Critical Role!