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What do you do after you fix chess? You fix poker, apparently. Not that this was game designer David Sirlin's intention with Pandante, his Kickstarter-funded card game, of course. In fact, all he initially wanted to do was create a game about lying - more specifically, a game about lying pandas."I didn't set out to solve any problems with poker, or to even think much about poker," Sirlin tells me over email. "I set out to make a game that used a certain bluffing mechanic - the idea that if you lie about something and no one calls you out, then you get to have it for real."
With that aim in mind, Sirlin took the basic structure of Texas Hold 'Em as a starting point. In Pandante, as in Hold 'Em, each player is dealt two cards of their own and shares three community cards with any other players. A further two cards are later added to the community pile, and the objective is to make as good a five-card hand as possible, betting on its value along the way. The Sirlin twist is that, at regular stages in a Pandante gambit, each player places bets on a board publicly declaring exactly the kind of hand that they hold. And they can lie about this. You'll want to lie, in fact, because there are bonuses for the player who claims to have the best hand at any one moment. You may want to think twice about lying, though, because there are also risks attached. You cannot reduce the quality of the hand you've said you have as the game proceeds - and the chances of getting caught only increase over time.
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