Caper Cards: Bells Hells – Review

It takes real confidence, and guts, to strip a tabletop game down to just a pack of cards. You have to really believe that your game is fun and intuitive enough that all it needs is a set of beautiful artwork cards. As far as Caper Cards: Bells Hells is concerned, they were absolutely right to have those guts.

In fact, the sheer simplicity of the game, the ease of picking it up, and the subtle complexity of Caper Cards are exactly what makes it so fantastic. The game plays as a form of blackjack (framed narratively as a heist) with you, and up to three others, trying to get as close to 21 with your combined cards without going over. Like blackjack, you will have a specific score to beat, made up of a fixed 11 and an unknown number. Go over 21, or fail to beat the Risk score when it is revealed, and you lose.

If you win, that’s just the first round. Each victory adds a complication to the next round, with each subsequent victory adding further difficulties, until you complete 4 rounds and complete the heist. These range from certain cards having extra value to stopping you from playing two of the same card. The treasure cards, which add the complications, are shuffled and randomised each run through so every game has a different feel to it. It’s great.

Each card you draw also has its own additional flavour too. Some can be rotated to change their value, some change other cards, and one even lets you see what the score you are aiming for is. Learning when is best to use each one, outside of just their inherent score value, is the key to mastering the game. Getting your co-players to do the same can be trickier though.

You aren’t allowed to confer with the other players, apart from confirming the current score, which is where the challenge really steps in. The game becomes as much about being adaptable as it is about understanding your own cards. This places a real premium on the cards which change others as it can turn a bust into the perfect total. Like I said earlier on, for a game that is just a deck of cards, the depth and complexity of each run are astounding. Each attempt felt different, fun, and the right amount of frustrating when we lost. You can even play the game solo too, there are special rules for that, and I have spent a lot of time doing this too thanks to the incredibly easy setup.

The cards themselves are really striking and of a very high quality. These are not your regular playing cards, they have a nice weight to them. The cardback art is wonderfully rich and gives a sense of wealth to the heist narrative of the game. The character art on the cards will divide opinion. I liked the highly stylised versions of the characters from Critical Role’s Campaign 3 but others may not. Standouts for me are The Trickster and The Insider which do a wonderful job of portraying Chetney and Laudna.

Don’t let that discourage you though if you aren’t a Critical Role fan. You need to know nothing about Critical Role to play this game, and knowing anything about it at all about it makes no difference in playing. The artwork pops enough to support itself outside of any connections to the wonderful world of Matt Mercer and the Critical Role cast.

Since I got my copy, it has lived on my kitchen table and is picked up at least once a day for a quick game, solo or otherwise.

Whether a fan of Critical Role or not, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Caper Cards: Bells Hells. The game is quick to set up, easy to play, difficult to win, and just fun all around. Being able to play with or without others is a massive boon too and adds great value for anybody who can’t regularly get people to sit down and play games with them.

Since I got my copy, it has lived on my kitchen table and is picked up at least once a day for a quick game, solo or otherwise. It is definitely one of my favourite pick-ups from 2023. I hope that they will release additional cards and sets, to expand to the other campaigns, as this format deserves more variations to add to the capers. For now though, I have another heist to run.

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