🕹️ Instructions: How to Play "Skull" (Adapted Version)

First, on the game, it's called Skull, aka Skulls & Roses, that started out as an English pub game with coasters, in which all players start off with 4 coasters, one has a skull on its underside, & the other 3 having roses or flowers on their underside. As per the picture I attached, the 6 stacks of poker style chips with fantasy artwork from another game are stacked, & one of the sets is turned over, showing the 3 chips with red round circles, which are the roses, & the fourth with a skull, represented by a blue square sticker with a square punched out within the square itself. Works great by simple touch when a low vision or blind player uses these to play. Here's an abbreviated rule set on how to play, 🙂

Skull Rules, 3 to 6 Players Each player starts their game with a set of four coasters; three contain a picture of a flower, while the other has a skull.

The idea of Skull is to bluff your way to victory while also relying on a small amount of luck in the process. The route to victory is a simple one in principle: you just need to win two rounds.

In practice though this proves to be a much greater challenge thanks to the determination from every other player to trick you into losing your coasters one by one.

Each round starts with every player placing one of their coasters face down on top of their team mat, without other players seeing what they’ve placed down. That’s not to stop them from telling everyone which coaster they’ve apparently used though, for reasons which will become clear later on.

Once every player has placed a coaster, play passes to the first player again. This is where things start getting interesting.

Each team has its own style of cards, and they're all gorgeous...

The first player can decide whether to play another coaster on top of the one already played, or make a bid of how many coasters they think they can turn over without revealing a skull.

If they play another coaster, play passes to the next player who can make the same decision and so on around the table. As soon as someone makes a bid, however, nobody can put anything more onto their pile.

From this point on each player can decide to raise the bid to turn more coasters or pass their turn, the latter of which drops them out of the bidding process.

As soon as there’s only one bid left and all other players have passed the player remaining becomes the challenger, and by far the most enjoyable part of the game kicks off: the reveal.

The challenger needs to turn over as many coasters as their bid promised without revealing a skull.

However, they need to turn all of their placed coasters over first, so if the challenger themselves played a skull then there’s every chance they’re already stuffed It happens a lot, usually as part of a bungled attempt to trick people into bidding a higher number. Seeing people’s faces when they realise they’ve just screwed themselves is a brilliant moment which never gets boring, especially if they’ve already tricked you once or twice in the game.

If a player flips their own skull they can choose a coaster from their set to discard from the game; nobody else will know whether a skull or flower has been discarded.

Assuming though that said player flips their own coasters without any drama they can pick and choose which discs to turn over next, just as long as they’re turning the top card on any remaining pile.

If the player does indeed manage to turn enough coasters and avoids the skulls then they win the round, and flip their team mat over to show they’ve won a round.

If, on the other hand, they reveal a skull from another player’s pile that player can choose a random unseen card from the challenger’s set, again discarding it from the game completely.

If you don’t have any more cards to place on your turn then you’ve got no option but to challenge and make a bid, something other players can make the most of if they know it’s about to happen.

Each set of cards has three designs: flower, skull, and the pattern on the back...