Day 10: Chloe

Golpe de Estado (card game)

A coup de tat (unsure how to spell this) in Spanish is a “golpe de estado” which in a literal translation is a sort of “punch to the state.” In every spare second we’ve had on this trip (as of late) we’ve been playing Coup, a game based on skill, logic, and deception. It’s been such a significant part of our lives recently, so I wanted to share the rules and our adaptations.

 

Our largest change is that this game is possible to play with one deck of normal cards (two decks is better but one works just fine) as opposed to the specially printed cards and coins (though those are nicer). We’ve also added some extra cards that I’ll explain in case you want to try this at home for the full Costa-Rican GSL experience.

 

To start, take your deck of cards and separate out all the red Aces, Kings, Queens, Jacks, Twos, and Threes (there should be two of each card). Deal two cards out to each person playing (most of the games I’ve been involved in have had six players, which will leave none of the separated cards left over). The remaining cards, ones that had not been separated out, become coins and are used face up. Each player will start with three of these.

 

Here are the abilities, some of which we’ve changed a little to balance our games out:

To start, everyone can take one coin from the bank or pay seven coins to coup someone, no matter what cards they hold. Coups cannot be blocked but players can always choose which card they discard.

The Ace is the Assassin and can pay three to assassinate one of another player’s cards. See: Contessa.

The King is Captain and can steal two coins from another player. See: Ambassador.

The Queen is Contessa and can block assassination attempts.

The Jack is Ambassador and can block stealing, along with being able to exchange cards by shuffling the discard pile, taking the top two, and choosing from those along with the Jack they claim to be playing. They take any one of these three cards and return the other two to the discard pile.

The Two is a Spy, who can see another person’s card. They pick, face down, from someone’s hand to look at (players are allowed to shuffle their cards) and gain one coin while doing this action.

The Three is the Duke, who has the ability to take three coins from the bank rather than one.

 

No matter what cards you really hold, you can claim any hand you want, whether it be a pair of Assassins or a Captain and a Duke. Lie as much as you want, but if another player suspects you of lying and challenges you, you can either:

1. Show the card you claimed to have to everyone (if you have it)
2. Quietly discard a card (which you technically can do even if you have the card you were accused of not having).

Say I have a Duke and a Contessa at a table of six. My first move could be to spy on another player, hoping no one has both spies in their hand (which would give them good reason to challenge my claim that I have a spy in mine). As the game progresses and two other people (who actually have spies) claim their spies, I can sabotage someone else by convincing them that I have the other spy so the supposed spies must be lying.

You can only challenge an action if you are the subject (such as with spying, assassinations, and stealing) but anyone can question more general actions (such as taking three or using a Jack to change cards out).

Say it’s one of my friends’ turns and they choose to assassinate me. My three reasonable choices are to:

1. Claim that I have a Contessa (in this situation, let’s say that I don’t)
2. Accept the assassination and discard one of my cards
3. Challenge that the accusing player has an Assassin in their hand.

If other players were to convince me that they had both Assassins in their hand or that they knew the accuser didn’t have an Assassin, I might choose option three. Say the accuser does in fact have an Assassin and shows it after I challenge them — I lose two cards: one for incorrectly challenging a player and the other from the original assassination.

We’ve played with some rules about whether you are allowed to pick up a new card after your last card has been revealed (if you were to have one card and it were to be incorrectly challenged). If you are choosing to play with this rule, the person who was just challenged can pick up a random card from the discard pile and choose between that card and the one they had before.

 

Here are some of the other cards we have experimented with:

Tens, which earn you a coin with every action you take (and you can only take one action per round, so it essentially earns you a coin per round).

Sevens, which has three abilities:

1. You can pay seven to get another card
2. Sacrifice your seven for seven coins
3. Discard your seven after an assassination and replace it with a random card from the discard pile.

When playing with the Joker, only add one card. They can be played once per game when someone accuses you of lying and are put face down in a separate discard pile. The player then chooses a card from the normal discard pile (face-down as well) to claim instead. The Joker, as with any other card, can be lied about, but this is dangerous considering there is only one.

For our additional cards, I recommend that you add them slowly and one at a time. The only testers we have are ourselves, so we’ve catered the experience towards what we think would be most enjoyable.

 

We’ve had a lot of fun playing Coup and getting to know our different play styles — mine is almost never lying (I lose a lot) but there are also some serial liars, careful liars, defensive players, etc. Our service project or location may change, but wherever we have a deck of cards we can play Coup whether that be at a restaurant table or on a muddy soccer field.