Guillotine is a card game created by Wizards of the Coast and designed by Paul Peterson. The game is set during the French Revolution, and was released on Bastille Day in 1998. The goal is to collect the heads of Nobles, accumulating points. Despite the grim topic of the game, the artwork is comical and the tone light.
Guillotine won the 1998 Origins Award for Best Traditional Card Game
Game play, for two to five players, takes approximately 30 minutes. Game equipment consists of two decks of cards, "Nobles" and "Actions", and a small cardboard structure representing the guillotine itself. This is mostly symbolic, though it can serve as a convenient indicator of the direction of the "line" of face-up Noble cards played on the game table representing condemned persons waiting to be beheaded. The Nobles cards carry points values and are collected by players after execution, while Action cards allow the player to perform various acts including rearranging the order of Nobles approaching the guillotine, stealing Nobles or Action cards from other players, enhancing the point values of certain categories of Nobles (see "Noble Types" below) and so forth.
The game is divided into three rounds or "days". Each day, twelve noble cards are dealt face-up in a row to be executed. A player's turn consists of:
1- Playing an Action card. This is optional.
2- Collecting the Noble card at the front of the line.
3- Drawing an Action card from the deck.
The Nobles come in five categories, each with its own color border:
- Church (blue)
- Military (red)
- Royal (purple)
- Negative (grey)
- Civic (green)
