The night couldn't have started off better in the auction house. What the dealer had first assumed to just be a boring antique doll had somehow instigated a full on bidding war between two collectors, now heading into the millions. But before he could get too excited about the bidding climbing to the highest seen all evening, a third collector joined in and that was where things started to get weird. Suddenly the millions were gone and instead they were bidding up with camels. Camels! But the chaos didn’t end there, yells of market crashes and stock exchanges echoed around as the bidding restarted again and again.
At the end of the evening the auctioneers could only wonder what happened as they looked over the night’s final takings….a box full of peanuts.
Cracking Open
Peanut Club comes in a box different to most other games on the shelf, not just because it’s small and square, but also it involves an outer jacket that opens up to give a brief overview of the game and then the central box needs to be pushed from the spine to slide out, which then opens up to reveal all the components while the rulebook stays tucked into the top flap out of the way. There’s a stack of cards to sort through and enough tokens for up to 6 players to start the bidding. But before you can get to all this you’ll need to break the seal to open it, a nice touch.
Beginning the Auctions
Setting up is fast and simple, the whole deck of objects is used each game so all the players need to grab are 5 tokens in a player colour and then a secret identity that shows them what category of objects will grant them bonus points at the end. After this the money is dealt out in a kind of variable but also even way while keeping it all secretive, as each card comes in one of three suits and a value of 1-5, so not letting your opponents know what exactly you have is vital for successfully undercutting their offers later. The currency cards are dealt out to each player 2 at a time until everyone has reached the minimum value to auction, so some players may end up with more cards than others, but could have less total value. The one concern here is that it isn’t openly tracked so players may end up taking extra over their amount for one reason or another, but for what should only be a quick 20 minute game it won’t be the end of the world. Once everyone has all their cards then the currency track is randomly set up to determine the relative value of money, camels and peanuts. Then open the bidding!
Worthless Millions
Each round of Peanut Club sees between 1 and 3 objects for auction, with the winning bidder taking all. The rounds are a free-for-all with first come first serve for any value as you can only offer higher than the current top bid, much like any standard auctions. What sets this apart from the standard is the multiple currencies, where a single unit of a higher valued commodity is worth more than any amount of lesser ones, so once the higher valued currencies come into play you're stuck bidding with those or better. Almost all auctions will end up being sold for the top of the three currencies, but this will be where the special tokens come into play. They can affect the auctions and payments in a variety of ways, such as crashing the value of a currency, setting the value of all cards to 1 regardless of number, or allowing you to convert and pay with any type of currency for the winning bid. Now, playing any tokens that affect the auction will cause it to reset, so there’s no Take That mechanics screwing over the winning bidder. All the tokens are one use and then flipped, however, there is a single card in the object deck that flips all used tokens back over. It is randomly shuffled into the deck so may not be useful at all or may help players get the most use out of them, in a kind of Push Your Luck sort of way, you don’t want to waste your tokens early in case a bid comes out you want, but wait too long and you miss out on the free refresh.
SOLD!
Up to six players can join in a game of Peanut Club and the game requires very little in terms of scaling for set up. But what you will find is that having more or less players can completely change the feel of the game.
With only three or possibly even with four players you can opt to try and take this more tactically. Push people to the top of their bidding limit and remember how high the other players are willing to go, then reset the bid with a power token. Now just bid their top amount and know they can’t beat you, or use it to your advantage to drive their offers up on something you don’t want to bleed them of funds early on. And by watching the bidding and collecting patterns you can gain an insight into the types of objects they specialise in and attempt to deny them the extra points they might earn. Oh sure, it could have a tactical element, but then again you could also just throw that all out the window and go crazy, and some games may well just descend into chaos anyway.
With five or six players though, you’ll find that chaos is almost the standard setting. Right from the get go there’s up to 30 tokens available to play at the auctions, and every character card in play makes it hard to work out who is trying to collect what. Most people just end up bidding on everything, especially when they get desperate. Depending on the timing of the token reset card you might end the game with several auctions full of token playing and everyone splashing the remainder of their cash to grab the last few lots before the end!
Pay Up Pay Up
Peanut Club is great as a filler game for all player counts, especially going up to 6 as some shorter games normally play only 4 or 5. I'd recommend not to try and take it too seriously, especially looking at the art for some of the object cards in play, there's a couple of Easter Eggs on them and the back of the rulebook too with the descriptions. Mentioning that, everything you need to know is in the rulebook so once taught to play the game is completely language independent, and this also helps make it suitable for the lower age range as you only need to be able to count numbers on the cards while playing.
All auctions are untimed and manually ended by any player counting to 3 and banging an imaginary gavel, normally the player currently winning who wants to secure the bid, but someone else might do it just to try and pressure some extra bids out there, although the rules do say you need to give time for further bids and not rush the countdown. What this means is the game length is directly controlled by this factor, and you might find players who engage in long drawn out bidding wars that get constantly reset by tokens might double the game length overall. Although once tokens and money start running out the game definitely starts to speed up.
There are no official variants, but after a few plays I've thought of a few that I might like to try, such as setting up the object deck with the token refresh shuffled into a certain part of it so you roughly know better when it might come out, or setting a list of starting money hands by players count and then randomly distributing.
Apart from those few ideas, Peanut Club is still good fun to break out at the start or end of the evening, I've managed to play with family members and heavier gamers alike. And most importantly, I've scooped wins over my rivals through peanuts!
