by W. Eric Martin

I'm pleased when I see older games coming back to print, both because the games themselves will be available again — whether for those looking for copies or those discovering the games for the first time — and because I'll have an excuse to play and talk about older games that I love, such as Alex Randolph's Big Shot.

This game first appeared in 2001 from Ravensburger, had a 2010-ish release from Brazilian company Grow Jogos e Brinquedos, then re-appeared in 2018 from Korean publisher OPEN'N PLAY, which changed its name to Playte in 2021 and has subsequently released two more editions, each smaller than the last.

For the most part, Big Shot is an old-school "single concept" game. The game lasts 18 rounds, and each round consists of an auction for a lot of four cubes. Whichever player wins an auction places these cubes on one or more of the thirteen properties on the game board. When a property has seven cubes on it, whoever has more cubes than each other player on that property owns it...but in the case of a tie for "more", those cubes are ignored, and this is where a second design concept sneaks in.

Big Shot re-uses the "ties are terrible" concept found in Randolph's 1988 game Hol's der Geier, a.k.a. Raj, Beat the Buzzard, and many other names. That game is also a bidding game, and when you tie in Hol's der Geier, you lose your bid and get nothing in return. Sometimes that's a good thing since you can "win" negative points, but for the most part it's not, and the game is little more than you trying to outguess what other players are going to bid based on what they've bid previously...at least until you play the same people again, at which point you are trying to double-guess whether they'll do the same thing as last time.

As in many old-school games, to play the game, you have to play the players.

The 2001 edition (Image: Antony Hemme)
Big Shot changes the "ties are terrible" structure from Hol's der Geier to (potentially) give you more control over who will tie when. In the earlier game, everyone bids at the same time, so the resolution of a bid is one-and-done. In Big Shot, ownership of a property is resolved only when it has seven cubes on it, and with four cubes up for grabs in each auction, you know at the start of each auction which properties could be claimed upon its resolution.

In the image above, if Red wins the four cubes up for grabs — that is, the cubes next to the orange cone — it can win the 20 lot by placing all the cubes on it since red will have three cubes, while white and yellow each have only two. If Yellow wins, they can claim the x2 lot the same way. (The x2 lot is worth 0 points on its own, but it doubles the value of the adjacent 9, 10, and 11 lots if the same player owns both.)

However, Black can win the 9 lot by placing a white and yellow on it as that will create a 2/2/2/1 situation — and all of the 2s will be ignored. What's more, Black will have a yellow and red left over, and it can place them on the x2 to set up a potential future tie. If Black then places a white and black cube on the x2 space, they'll win that as well! (Of course, they're also setting up White to win that property by placing a red and yellow on it to create a 3/3/1 situation, so maybe that's not ideal. It depends on which lots of cubes remain, how much money White has, etc.)

Brown takes the crown
The challenge of Big Shot is that you have only 18 cubes, and they'll all be placed on the game board at some point. Will they win you properties or be wasted in ties? Who will control where they go? And how much is it worth to you to dictate their locations?

You start with only $10, so your bidding is fairly restricted. You can take a $10 loan once each round, but you pay the interest in advance, getting only $9 for the first loan, $8 for the second, and so on.

You might think Big Shot is only a counting exercise, and to some degree that's true: How much will I earn if I bid $X? How much will you earn? Who will be forced to take out a loan to keep bidding?

But the situation gets trickier as players get better at the game and set up multiple scoring situations. I've found that some first-time players have a hard time envisioning all the possibilities for who can win what, which can lead to a lopsided game like the one above. Ideally everyone can push through to game #2, at which point it feels like more of a challenge, especially if you can use "extra" cubes to set other players against one another. Again, you need to play the players as much as the game, but in their first playing, many players will be adrift.

The 2018 editionIn 2024, a BGG user rated Big Shot a 4, writing "I probably completely misunderstood this game. It seems it's mostly about destroying other people's chances of getting a scoring area." Um, no, that's pretty much what the game is about!

Big Shot is a mean game in which you want to wreck others by wasting their cubes and forcing them to spend more than they want to gain a property. A player needs to control at least two properties in addition to having the most money — property value + cash on hand - (# of loans • 10) — in order to win, so they can't sit back and do nothing. Players need to elbow their way onto the game board, sometimes going deep into debt along the way.

For as much as I love this game, I've played Big Shot only seven times over the past twenty years: five times on a purchased copy and twice on a review copy from Playte. Sheesh, that's a sad number. I need to get it to the table more instead of waiting for the next edition in the 2030s...

For more details on gameplay and the full rules, watch this video:

Youtube Video