The Bucket King Board Game Review

Year Published: 2002

Players: 2-6

Playing Time: 45 Minutes

Designer Stefan Dorra isn’t terribly well-known in modern gaming outside of his seminal design, For Sale, which is an evergreen title with numerous editions. If you’ve played one of his games, it’s probably that one.

Most will not have played The Bucket King. Most won’t even have heard of it. In its time, at least, it had a small amount of praise. It was recommended for the Spiel des Jahres in 2002, and received a handful of other minor nominations for various Japanese and German awards.

It also received a 3D implementation in 2014, though this seems to have caught on even less than the original. Judging by the artwork and earlier award nominations, my (admittedly uninformed) guess is that its primary market was Japan.

So how did I stumble into it in 2023? Well, I didn’t. I had to create my own copy, since none were available to me.

And why go through that trouble for a forgotten card game? It’s an interesting question, but one I’m happy to explain.

The Bucket King – The Premise

You’re farmers. And as farmers, you of course want…the largest stack of buckets? Sure, let’s go with that.

But the other farmers are trying to out-do your bucket stack (will the drama never end?!). So you start sending animals at their bucket pyramids to knock them over, while fending off similar animal stampedes.

This is done via cardplay. You’re dealt a hand of 12 cards in one of five suits, with numbers 1-8 in each and each corresponding to a particular animal type. The colors of the suits correspond to the colors of your buckets, which you’ll construct in a pyramid. Lose a hand (by failing to match or beat the value of a suit played at you) and you lose a bucket of that color.

But buckets need to be supported by two others, so if you aren’t careful and lose a bucket in the middle of a stack, you’ll soon see your pyramid dwindling rapidly.

Other nuances lend tension to your decisions. You’ll always draw a card after a turn and can play 1-3 cards. But you don’t draw back up to 12, you only take one. So the more you play large card stacks to win hands, the smaller your hand size will be for the remainder of the game. Additionally, you can match the value played at you (instead of exceeding it) to reverse the direction of the attack, adding some decision points in the form of who you target, and when.

Additionally, you can’t have two unjoined stacks of buckets, so if they’re split and you have mini-stacks of, say, 3-and-3, but they aren’t touching, you no longer have 6 buckets to your name. Only 3 will remain.

This is a last-person-standing wins game. Some variants have the game end once one or two players are eliminated. I prefer to play until there’s only one person left, mainly because the wait time for eliminated players has never been too bad.

Stefan Dorra and the Sharp Edges

For Sale might be Dorra’s most popular design because it’s never too punitive. You’ll feel stung at times, yes, but this is among the more benign designs of his I’ve played. At the deeper ends of uncompromising gameplay in his designs, the brutality is palpable.

Here, it’s somewhere in the middle, but the moment you have to lose not one, but four buckets in a turn as the table erupts in laughter and you groan mightily, you’ll wonder what could be even more harsh. If you enjoy these moments, Bucket King will not disappoint. If you don’t, well, the opposite holds true as well.

The other thing Dorra’s designs are known for is their immediacy. By that I mean that there’s generally very little barrier between your decisions and their immediate, often pronounced, consequences. His designs are generally very rules-lite, but not lacking depth, meaning that the depth comes from how the players themselves control the action with the tools given to them.

This is all great for me personally, and it’s why I’ve proactively tracked down many of his designs. The Bucket King was an edge-case for me; I waffled on cobbling together a homebrew copy for several months. But I’m happy I did.

Party Game Vibes, Strategy Game Nuance

The Bucket King can be played as a silly card game where you simply fling animals at other players and see what happens. It provides some goofy fun, and you never need to engage with the game on a deeper level to enjoy it.

The opportunities for tactical and strategic nuance are surprising to me, though, given the absurd thematic premise and party-style “take that” gameplay.

The way in which you construct your pyramid is the first of these interesting decision points. Obviously if you have no cards of a particular suit at the start, you won’t want that color all on the bottom of your bucket pyramid. But there’s subtlety beyond this as well, and I’ve seen players construct pyramids and manage their hand in such a way that they go an entire game without ever losing more than a single bucket on a turn (a feat I’ve never personally managed).

The next is cardplay. Playing 2-3 cards in a turn increases the likelihood that you won’t lose that round. But your hand size will be permanently lowered. When is this an acceptable tradeoff? There aren’t easy answers, but the consideration itself is fascinating.

It also means that you might opt to lose a hand deliberately, instead of playing three cards to stay alive.

Lastly, the table management, for lack of a better term, matters. How you collectively shift your focus toward or away from certain players can be something you explicitly discuss or silently agree to, but it will need to happen in any session in order to self-balance the proceedings. Card draw will favor one or more players, but this can be accounted for by how you approach these metagame elements.

The Bucket King – Conclusions

So am I describing a surprisingly tactical hand management game? Or a take-that party game card-chucker?

Both, in truth. And in this case, where other games occasionally fail to serve two thematic masters without sacrificing bits of both, both sides of this game work well. You can gleefully knock each other’s buckets over, laughing and grumbling at one another, while also allowing yourself to go one level deeper on your individual decisions and what they mean to the long-term whole. This strategy doesn’t mar the fun.

It’s also a game that’s over in under an hour even with max players. It might push that line if you’re at max and also teaching, but more generally this will be a half-hour light strategy and/or super-filler that doesn’t overstay its welcome, providing chuckles and good-natured curses while musing over whether or not a rampaging pack of sheep or dogs would be easier to stop.

My money’s on the dogs, but my success (or rather, lack thereof) in The Bucket King thus far is not exactly evidence toward this hope.