Fukutarou’s Idle Hands is an unassuming little thing. Its simplicity lends it a false sense of security. This is no mere trick-taker, you see, but a nasty bit of business that nearly always results in basement-level scores and more than a little anguish. Just my sort of thing.

There it is: the one shot.

As a trick-taker, Idle Hands is all about poisoning the well. Spoiling a trick is a well-known strategy among enthusiasts, but here the concept is given its fullest expression. The idea is that every card you win is worth a positive point. Except for 4s and 8s, that is. Those are worth negative points. Negative points worth their rank. While every other card is worth a measly +1, these are worth -4 and -8 respectively.

Idle Hands is built around the idea of demons conducting missions for their underworld overlord, so a few poisoned hands might be enough to qualify it for consideration. But there are a few other wrinkles that elevate it into something truly awful.

For example, every trick opens with a mission. Everybody gets either three or four of these at the outset of each hand, depending on player count, and the lead player must select a mission before playing their actual card. Missions are easy: this is the suit that players need to get the highest rank in.

Of course, winning tricks is a rather loaded proposition in Idle Hands. You want to win tricks, but not tricks with 4s or 8s, but also certain cards aren’t amenable to easy manipulation. Like the other releases in this latest cycle of imports from New Mill Industries, Man-Eating House and Somnia, there are special cards to consider, although these are easier to parse than in those titles. Here the special effects are limited to the fringes of each suit. The highest rank, 10, isn’t guaranteed to win, instead losing outright if more than one suit is played into any given trick. Similarly, 1s don’t offer guaranteed losses, instead winning if all cards are of the same suit. There are no easy plays.

Your mission, which you have no option but to choose.

This lends a great deal of control to anybody willing to tally cards and play the shark. Most of the time, anyway. The opening mission cards, drawn as they are from the deck proper, provide a few morsels of information about what everybody is holding. But with only forty cards total, hands are slim enough that it’s entirely possible that somebody won’t be holding a suit at all when the round begins. More than once, I’ve seen somebody claim a whopping negative sixteen or twenty points on the first trick alone, all because they assumed a full suit would be in play when it wasn’t.

Is this a problem? It’s hard to say. The effect is less pronounced with three players than four, solely because everybody is handling more cards per round. At the very least the game is swingy, but also brisk enough that a truly spoiled tally feels like a mercy killing rather than torture. And that swinginess is very much the point, with just enough wiggle room to permit players to gang up on somebody who hasn’t had their score poisoned enough. The devil’s workshop indeed.

In one sense, Idle Hands is stringier than its peers, lacking the wild effects of Man-Eating House, the contract bidding of Reapers, or the historical weight of Somnia. Of the set, however, it might also be the most functionally crystallized. There are no flowcharts here, just good old-fashioned screwing with everybody’s score. It doesn’t quite hit the same high notes as Schadenfreude (although what does?), but it does evoke similar giggles. Above all, Idle Hands is a rather silly trick-taker, which is sometimes exactly what my mood calls for.

oh no

While I haven’t fallen in love with any of these latest New Mill Industries, Idle Hands is certainly the cleanest offering. It’s easy to learn, sharp, and produces mean-spirited laughter well in keeping with its devilish setting. Nothing is quite so satisfying as giving Geoff negative ten points on a whim.

Idle Hands is available to preorder from New Mill Industries.

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A complimentary copy was provided.