Pili Pili

Pili Pili is a game that came out of almost nowhere when I picked it up on the Amazon Black Friday sale. In the last month it has become probably one of our favourite go-to card games in the house, and it’s had an extremely high amount of play.

At its heart, Pili Pili is a fairly simple trick-taking game where, much like everyone’s old video game favourite Hearts, you play your hands and the person with the highest number wins the hand. Where this differs, however, is in the core concept of how the game works.

When you start with your hand of five cards at the beginning of a round, what you have to predict is how many rounds you think you are going to win. You can say anything from zero to five, and it doesn’t actually matter whether you win these or not. It’s more about how close you get to your prediction. This is a really cool mechanic that means it’s not about how good or bad your cards are, it’s about how well you can read your hand. This creates really interesting gameplay that all of us, from Toby up to the adults, really like.

At the end of the round you get a chilli for how many off you are. For example, if you predicted two and you got one or three, you get one chilli. If you got zero or four, that’s two chillies. Once a player gets to seven chillies, the game is over, and the person with the least chillies wins.

To make it that little bit more interesting, at the beginning of each round you draw a card and this adds a modifier. This can sometimes be something like all players playing their cards at the same time. It could be that you have to make your prediction before you see your cards, it could be that you place the cards on your head so everyone else can see them and you have to bet, or it could be that after you’ve made your bet you move around a card or two.

This adds a nice little twist that keeps you interested and makes the game even better.

Production values are hard to comment on because, at the end of the day, it’s a pack of cards. That said, the cards are nice and pleasant to play with, with a good linen finish, and the artwork is really nice with a Mexican-inspired feel.

It’s simple, but with a lot of depth. I really like Pili Pili. It’s probably one of my favourite card games I’ve played in a long time, and it’s one that will definitely come out regularly for family game nights.