Wouter & Ymke 
There’s some serious competition going on at this farm. The horse, cow, pig and goat have gathered around the table to play a game, and the winner gets to come up with a new nickname for the loser. The goat wins, the rather proud horse comes last, and ends up with the nickname Paardenkop, or “horse head”. And yes, that’s where Paardenkoppen gets its name.
It’s a suitably silly story for what is, underneath all those farm animals, a fairly straightforward card game. You’re playing numbered cards into four rows, trying to collect chips with specific cards and occasionally trying very hard not to play the exact card another player needs. There isn’t much to learn before you can start playing, but it took us a few rounds to realise that seeing what you’d like to do and actually being allowed to do it are two different things here.
👥 3-6 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Not credited
🎨 Artwork: Denis Martynets
🏢 Publisher: White Goblin Games (Review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Paardenkoppen contains four suits: horses, cows, pigs and goats. Each has thirteen cards numbered from 1 to 13, but every animal also has its own head card. The horse uses 13, the cow 12, the pig 11 and the goat 10. These four cards are how you collect the chips placed beside the animals.
At the start of each round, every player places one value-5 chip beside each of the four animals on the mat. This creates four separate piles to win. Any pile that isn’t collected stays there for the next round, when everyone adds another chip. If nobody manages to play a particular head card for several rounds, there can eventually be quite a nice amount sitting beside that animal.
All 52 cards are dealt between the players, and turns go clockwise. Each animal gets its own row, and every row has to begin with the 6. If none of the four 6s has been played yet and you have one in your hand, you must play one. If you don’t have a 6, you have to pass and put a value-1 chip into the central pot.
Once a 6 is down, that animal’s row can grow in both directions. Below it you play 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. Above it you play 7, 8, 9 and so on. You can’t skip numbers. If you have a card that can legally be played, you must play a card. When you have several possibilities, you choose which one. If nothing in your hand can be played, you pass and add a value-1 chip to the pot.
Head cards have one extra condition. Before you can play one, both the 1 and the card immediately below that head card must already be on the table. So to play the horse 13, for example, the horse 1 and 12 both need to have been played. When you manage to play a head card, you take all the chips waiting beside that animal and add them to your personal supply.
The round ends as soon as one player has played their final card. That player takes everything from the central pot, while chips still sitting beside the animals remain there. Everyone then adds another value-5 chip to each animal and a new round begins. You decide beforehand how many rounds you want to play, with ten being the recommendation in the rules. Alternatively, you can continue until someone can no longer make the required contributions. Whoever has the highest total value in chips at the end wins.
Artwork & Components
Paardenkoppen certainly looks cheerful on the table. The four animals have exaggerated cartoon faces, and they all look slightly too invested in whatever is happening around that card table. The cards use a different colour for each animal, and the numbers appear in several corners, so we never had much trouble reading the rows from different sides of the table.
The part that caught our attention most was the long green play mat. It sits between the rows and shows the four animals together with their head-card numbers, with space beside each one for its chip pile. It makes the layout easy to understand at a glance. Once all four rows start stretching away from it, though, Paardenkoppen uses more table space than its box might suggest. Not a problem on a normal dining table, but perhaps don’t start setting it up between the coffee cups.
There are also plenty of cardboard chips in values of 1, 5, 10, 20 and 50. They look a little like casino chips, and the different colours make the values easy to recognise. They’re simple cardboard tokens, nothing unusual, but physically moving and stacking them works well here. Once one animal has been ignored for a couple of rounds, that growing pile becomes rather difficult not to stare at.
Overall, everything is easy to read, and the farm theme gives what could otherwise have been a rather abstract card game some personality. I especially like the expressions on the animals. The goat already looks like it knows something you don’t, which seems appropriate considering the story.
Our Experience
We understood Paardenkoppen pretty quickly, but our first few rounds didn’t play quite how we expected. Looking at those four developing rows, we were already thinking about which cards we wanted to keep, which rows we didn’t want to continue and what somebody else might be waiting for. Then your turn arrives, you look at your hand and discover you have exactly one card you can play. More than once someone said, “I really don’t want to play this,” checked their hand again as if another option might magically appear, and then put it down anyway.
It was different when we had several playable cards. Holding a few consecutive cards from the same animal sometimes meant we could keep part of that row waiting until we were ready to continue it. The 6s caused the most obvious example of this. In one game, one player somehow ended up with all four. They had to play one to get things started, but the remaining three stayed in hand whenever another card was available. For a while, several rows simply couldn’t begin. Everyone knew who was responsible, and naturally that player received absolutely no sympathy.
The 1s caused their own share of suspicious looks around the table. If we didn’t have that animal’s head card ourselves, we usually weren’t in a hurry to play its 1. Sometimes we could leave it sitting in our hand for quite a while. Other times we knew perfectly well that somebody was probably waiting for it, only to find that it was the card we had to play. That led to moments where someone immediately played the head card afterwards and happily collected the pile we had just helped them reach. There’s not much you can say in your defence at that point except, “I had to.”
At first, we were also perhaps a little too happy whenever we received one or more head cards. They obviously give you a chance to collect the larger piles, so they look like the cards you want. We had one game where one of us didn’t collect a single animal pile, and the final scores weren’t remotely close. I mean, someone has to be the horse in this story. But we also had hands where a head card sat there for most of the round waiting for the right cards to appear, while somebody without one kept putting cards down and emptied their hand first. After that, being dealt a head card didn’t automatically get the same excited reaction.
We preferred playing with more people. By the time our turn came back around, several more cards had usually appeared and something that had been stuck in our hand could suddenly be played. We were less convinced by the recommended ten rounds. By then, we felt we’d been through enough deals, so we started playing one round per player, with everyone getting to start once. Of course, fewer rounds also mean there’s less time for an unlucky deal to be balanced by a better one later. We didn’t mind. The shorter game was a better match for how we were actually playing it, usually with plenty of conversation going on around the table.
Our Thoughts
After a few games, we were much quicker at spotting which cards might matter. We knew to keep an eye on the animal piles, noticed when somebody seemed to be waiting for a particular row and were less eager to get rid of certain cards just because we could. I’m not sure there’s much more beyond that, though. Paardenkoppen still decides quite often which cards you’re allowed to play, and knowing that another move would be better doesn’t change the cards in your hand. I don’t think this is a card game where we’ll still be discovering new ways to play after twenty games.
I do like the growing chip piles. An animal that hasn’t paid out for a few rounds quickly becomes the one everybody looks at when the next hand is dealt. Of course, somebody still needs to receive the right head card and get it onto the table. We had some very uneven final scores because of that, and I wouldn’t read too much into someone finishing far ahead. The piles make individual rounds more interesting to follow, but they can also give a lot of points to the right person at the right time.
We enjoyed Paardenkoppen more once we stopped caring too much about whether the final scores accurately showed who had played best. Most turns are over quickly because there are only so many cards you can put down, and nobody at our table spent ages staring at their hand while everyone else waited. That left plenty of room for conversation, complaints about being forced to play a card and the occasional accusation when someone unlocked a large pile for somebody else. The game isn’t asking for your full concentration every second, and for the kind of groups I’d play this with, I’m fine with that.
I can see it working well with families, occasional players and groups where some people play games regularly and others don’t. Nobody needs much experience to understand why they really don’t want to play that 1 sitting in their hand. On the other hand, if you want most turns to give you several ways to outplay the people around you, I’d look elsewhere. Sometimes Paardenkoppen simply tells you which card is leaving your hand next, and that remains our main criticism.
For us, shortening the game made quite a difference. We liked watching the chip piles grow, trying to work out who was waiting for which card and, every now and then, actually managing to keep that card away from them. Just as often our plans went nowhere, but Paardenkoppen is light enough that we usually laughed about those situations rather than getting annoyed. I wouldn’t play ten rounds very often, and I don’t think it’s a game we’ll spend evenings trying to master. But with a few people around the table, some conversation going on and nobody taking the final pile of chips too seriously, we’d happily play it again.
📝 We received a copy of Paardenkoppen from White Goblin Games.
