Bleeding Sherwood PDF

Bleeding Sherwood was one of the original Cheapass Games, #004.

• Release Year: 1996

• Game Type: Card Game

• Designer: James Ernest

• Players: 3 to 8

• Playing Time: 30 Minutes

• Components to Print: Cards, Rules

• You Also Need: Patience

You’re a traveling salesman, following Robin Hood through Sherwood Forest. He gives money to the poor, and then you sell them a bunch of expensive crap they don’t need.

Bleeding Sherwood was Cheapass Games #004, and it was one of our earliest mistakes. It’s not a bad game, but it can definitely fall flat on the first play-through. So the game got some terrible early reviews, and never really recovered.

Players start with hands of “Goodes,” representing useless crap to sell. There’s a deck of “Peasant” cards, each with a value in Gold, and the players will bid with their Goodes to capture the Peasants, or really, their gold.

It’s pretty simple, really. But first-time players often made the mistake of bidding too much, like they were going to get more bid cards, and then found out that they basically did not. They ran out of bid cards, figured the game was broken, and somehow that wasn’t fun.

We tried to explain the strategy a little better in subsequent printings (basically pointing out that bid cards are valuable and hard to replace) but eventually the game went out of print, never to return.

Links:

• Print-and-Play PDF package (Zip)

• How to Make Cards Video

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