Dmytro Polovynka

Bid Spoof

Bid Spoof or Milanian Spoof is a Spoof variant where players instead of simply guessing the number of coins, should make bids and should either tell a higher bid, or call a previous player. During the game players win or lose coins and the last player wins. In a way it is similar to a dice game “Liar’s dice”.

There are five type of bids:

We played that a “zero” bid doesn’t have to be first in the round, but the player saying “zero” couldn’t have made any bids in the round before. It’s different from the rules described below.

Below is an excerpt of the rules from the original website:

As in Traditional (Hollywood Rules), all the players start off with 0-3 coins in the right hand and the ‘Coin Count’ refers to the total coins held in all the right hands. However, the aim of this game is not to guess the coin count straight-off. In Milan Rules Spoof the players make increasingly higher bids (guesses on the coin count) until someone believes a bid is too high. Since you win by being the last one in the game, you try to make your bids as low as possible and hope you don’t get called.

He who was ‘crap’ (i.e. the first player out from the previous game) starts off with the first bid. The first player could, and very often does, start with a bid of ‘one’. The next player (the direction is decided by the first player and can vary from round to round) now has a choice: he can RAISE the bid (for example by saying ‘two’ or ‘three’) or he can CALL his opponent, which he does by opening his right hand. Once a player is called, all the other players also open their hands and the coins are counted. If there are AT LEAST as many coins as the bid, then the caller loses. Alternatively, if the coin count is less than the bid then it is the called player who loses. A losing player loses a coin. If he had only one coin left then he’s out of the game. .

A round proceeds with increasing bids until someone is called. After someone loses a coin, a new round starts with the total coin count reduced by one. The new round is initiated by whoever lost a coin in the preceding round. When all the players apart from one are out, then the remaining player is the winner.

That is the basic outline of the game, but to fully enjoy Milan Rules Spoof you must be aware of the three special calls:

The ‘Cliff’ call: This is an extremely dangerous / useful call. When a player calls Cliff he is saying that he thinks the preceding bid is EXACTLY equal to the coin count. If he is wrong he loses a coin, as usual. But if he is right, he WINS a coin. This is the only way a player can increase his coin count and is the main reason end games can last a long time. It is also the basis for some amazing come-backs. Whoever called Cliff, win or lose, starts the bidding in the next round (unless he got it wrong and only had one coin, and so is now out). Cliff is generally used when there are a small number of coins on the table, and hence the odds of being wrong are less enormous.

The ‘Spoof’ call. You would say Spoof if you thought the maximum number of coins was being held. For example, in a game with 4 players all with 3 coins the maximum would be 12. In the this case you would say “Spoof”, meaning “they’re all there’. If indeed they are all there, then the round is a DRAW and nobody loses a coin whereas if you’re wrong then you lose a coin. So when is Spoof used? Spoof can be used by cunning players to prevent the next player making a Cliff call. Let’s take the above example, instead of saying 12, and thereby leaving the Cliff call open to you, the player before you can say Spoof. He, too, believes they’re all there but he can’t Cliff it because the bid to him was not 12. By saying Spoof he can at least stop you from winning a coin with a successful Cliff call

The ‘Zero’ call. Only for special occasions. If you start a round by saying Zero, then everyone must automatically open their hands. If there are no coins out , then everyone apart from you loses a coin. If there are one or more coins then you lose coin. All most exclusively used in one on one end games, when there aren’t many coins.

Here is the website with the rules (in the end of the page): Spoof Rules on Web Archive This is a YouTube video explaining the rules (Ukrainian, but with English subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYTJ9z7z9Fk

These rules on Board Game Geek