Haggis (Saturday Review)

Take some sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, mince them together with some chopped onion, oatmeal, suet, spices and salt, mix in some stock and cook it all together in the animal’s stomach for about an hour. Add some neeps and tatties and enjoy your Haggis by Sean Ross from Portland Game Collective.

For real foodies, Haggis is a savoury Scottish pudding that is a real treat when cooked well. For lovers of card games, Haggis is a wonderful ladder-climbing game that works well with a relatively wide player count. As far as I am concerned, Haggis has another meaning. For me, it is a card game that feels very much like a traditional trick-taking game, with bidding, a lead player deciding what the following players can play and a kind of trump mechanism. Haggis reminds me of Skat, when played with three people, or Doppelkopf when played with four.

But let me explain how it is possible for a simple deck of cards to be so many different things for different people.

Ladder-Climbing Haggis

If you’ve played ladder-climbing games such as Scout, Odin or Sakana Stack, Haggis will be very familiar, but also a bit different. Haggis is arguably stricter than the other games.

First of all, there are only certain combinations of cards you can play. While a single card and a set, which is two or more cards of the same value, will be familiar, sequences and stairs may be new. Sequences are at least three sequential cards of the same suit and stairs are two or more consecutive sets of the same suits. So a red six, a red seven, a blue six and a blue seven would make a stair.

Haggis‘ other restriction is that the following players have to play the same number of cards and the same type of combination, but of a higher value. So when the lead player plays a blue two for example, which is a single, the next player can only play a single card too, but it has to be a three or higher. The three doesn’t have to be of the same colour as the lead card, it just has to be higher. If the lead player plays the red cards four, five, six and seven as a sequence, the next player would have to play four sequential cards starting at least at five. So five, six, seven and eight of the same colour would beat the lead sequence. The same goes for sets and stairs, of course.

Those restrictions lead to really interesting strategies and tactics. You have to keep an eye on your cards. If you have them sorted by suit, you must not forget that sets of the same number are also a possible play. It’s a bit like in Odin, where you play cards all of the same suit or all with the same value.

Bombs and Court Cards

Haggis has a couple more tricks up its sleeve though. Every player gets a set of three so-called court cards. These are jack, queen and king. They can be used as wildcards to help you complete your sets, sequences or stairs. While using them as such is very tempting, you quickly learn not to succumb too quickly.

That’s because court cards can also be played as so-called bombs. Bombs are a way of beating a set, sequence or stair someone has played. Bombs can also beat other bombs, because they come in six different variations representing six different strengths. The weakest bomb is playing a three, five, seven and nine of any suit. After that come jack and queen, then jack and king, then queen and king, followed by jack, queen and king. The strongest bomb is a combination of three, five, seven and nine in the same colour. As you can see, court cards make great bombs.

Bombs function differently from what happens when beating a lead combination in the usual way. While normally the player who is left after everyone else has passed wins the cards and their points, the person winning with a bomb has to give the cards to another player. Mind you, it actually depends on the variant of Haggis you play as to what bombs do, but they always work a bit differently.

Also depending on which scoring variant you choose, the court cards can earn more points. So then you may prefer not to waste them on bombs, but at the same time, bombs are powerful and fun. They certainly add spice to Haggis.

Bidding

There is one more mechanism that differentiates Haggis from many other ladder-climbing games: bidding. Depending on which variant you play, you can bid on being the player to get rid of all of their cards first. In the Haggis and Tatties variant, there is an auction at the beginning of a round, where you can bid 15, 30 or 45 points. If you win with 15 points, you get to take the three cards left over after dealing out everyone’s hands and swap them out with up to three of your cards. If you win with 30 points, you only get the top two cards to swap out, and with 45 points, you only get one.

By the way, the cards left in the middle are called the haggis, which is where the game’s name comes from.

It’s the bidding that immediately reminded me of Skat. In this traditional German trick-taking game, the winner of the bid gets to swap two cards left over with cards from their hand. That player then plays alone against the other two in this three-player game. Haggis feels very similar and even though there is no one-against-many mechanism, when you win the bid, you do paint a target on your back, because if you don’t empty your hand first, you lose the points you bid.

Now you can see why Haggis reminds me so much of the trick-taking games I grew up with. While there is no need to follow the lead suit, you do have to play the same number of cards and the same type of combination. While there is no trump, the bombs feel very similar. The bidding tops it all off and makes Haggis feel very reminiscent of the trick-taking games I love and know well.

Cooked Haggis

I have fallen in love with Haggis – the card game that is. I think it works really well with three and four players. I’ve not tried it with two, but it sounds like it is also a really good experience. So, if you want to try a ladder-climbing game that is a bit meatier and that is reminiscent of some of the great traditional trick-taking games out there, then Haggis is for you.

Useful Links

• Haggis: https://portlandgamecollective.bigcartel.com/product/haggis
• Rulebook: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/278213/haggis-rulebook-pgc-english-edition
• Portland Game Collective: https://portlandgamecollective.bigcartel.com/
• BGG listing: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37628/haggis
• Scout review: https://tabletopgamesblog.com/2022/07/02/scout-saturday-review/
• Odin review: https://tabletopgamesblog.com/2024/03/30/odin-saturday-review/
• Sakana Stack review: https://tabletopgamesblog.com/2024/09/14/sakana-stack-saturday-review/

Videos

Transparency Facts

I feel that this review reflects my own, independent and honest opinion, but the facts below allow you to decide whether you think that I was influenced in any way.

• I played a friend's copy of the game.
• At the time of writing, neither the designers, nor the publisher, nor anyone linked to the game supported me financially or by payment in kind.

Audio Version

Intro Music: Bomber (Sting) by Riot (https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/)

Music by https://www.free-stock-music.com

Playlist

These are the songs I listened to while I was writing this review: