The premise of Hasan Paracha's card game is that a mad king is on his deathbed being visited by his many children. Evidently this is a realm without primogeniture and the king announces that he cannot pick favourites from among his children so he decrees that, on his death, his crown and fortune will be dumped at sea. He muses, however, that if he had but one heir then they would of course inherit everything. This prompts the deadly rivalry between siblings that is at the heart of Fight for Inheritance...
The 2-4 players each take one of the eight royal characters, each of whom has a unique single-use 'royal decree' power that can be used once per game. Players start off with two bodyguards and a hand of seven additional action cards, and you can play action cards for their effects and/or spend gold (around half the cards represent 1 or 2 gold). You can, for example, bribe a rival player's bodyguard to take them from that player and add them to your hand. You can also spend gold to hire an additional bodyguard. Much of the game involves the to and fro of bribes and counter-bribes taking bodyguards. Players normally draw a card at the end of their turn and add it to their hand, but if ever they draw an assassination attempt card without having a bodyguard to sacrifice in their defence, then they're out of the game.
There are quite a few cards that negate bribe attempts and the effects of other cards, and you can't expect to get your money back if your bribe fails, so this is a game with some wild swings of fortune. The assassination attempt card(s) are an existential threat and being able to foresee what's coming up in the draw deck using a Clairvoyance card can be a powerful effect, so it can be worth having gold on hand to hire a spy to look at at least some of what the Clairvoyance card has revealed, subject to the roll of d4...
This all makes for a light-hearted cutthroat 'take that' card game. It works at all player counts. We've enjoyed the interaction between players in a three- and four-player game but there's a particular frissant of excitement playing Fight for Inheritance as a two-player game because there's more scope for Princess Bride-style bluff and counter-bluff over the cards that give a player advance notice of what's coming up in the draw pile for them and for the other player.
Red Cannon Games are bringing Fight for Inheritance to Kickstarter later this year. Click here to get a notification when the campaign launches.