Date Night Sharpshooters

For months now, Randel has been wanting to find this board game called Sharpshooters. I had never heard of it, but he swore up and down that it was an awesome game and looked for it everywhere we went---Walmart, Target, the mall. He could never find it.

For our anniversary, I knew he'd be ecstatic if I presented him with the game he's been trying to find for so long. So I hunted it down and found it on Amazon.

So for date night tonight (after watching The Voice and New Girl, of course), we played Sharpshooters. And I loved it! The fact that I whooped Randel's butt has nothing to do with my feelings of goodwill toward this game.

The best way I can explain Sharpshooters is to say it's kind of a combination of poker and Yahtzee! Each person starts out with 16 die (yep, you read that number right), and you roll 5 at a time, trying to fill a somewhat BINGO-like score card.

 

 

You can roll until you can't place any more die, or you can stop after placing a dice or die, if that will help your strategy. If you can play something, then you must. So if you were playing on the above card and the only open spot was the last black 4 and you rolled a 4, you'd have to play it.

Whoever places the last die in each row gets the corresponding number of chips...and whoever places the last black die in the row has to pay the banker. So you can see why you wouldn't want to play that black 4. But anticipating who's going to have to pay up is part of the fun of the game.

Each game lasts 6 rounds, but Randel and I played 9 because it was just so much fun. We weren't actually keeping score because it was plain to see that the winner was moi, but we counted up our chips just for kicks and the final score was...

Drumroll, please...

1960 to 580. I think I found my new favorite game.