Deadlines Review

Deadlines is a game for 1-10 players ages 12 and older. Start the game by shuffling the character cards and dividing them into piles of 68 cards each, have fun with that. Make sure they’re name side up. Next, lay out the tombstone cards, labeled Date of Birth, Life Span and Date of Death. Lastly, take the top card from each deck and place one under each of the tombstone cards for a primer. The oldest player starts by drawing a card from the character decks without looking at the back. They must then sort it under one of the three tombstone card columns in the correct order. Does it come before or after the card already in play? Once they lock in their guess, flip over the card to check the answer. If they guessed correctly, the card is now part of the column, if not, the player keeps the card as a penalty. Play continues clockwise until a column has 12 cards, whereby the tombstone card is flipped over and becomes unavailable. Once all three columns are complete, whoever has the least amount of penalty cards wins! Have a lot of penalty cards? Worry not, some special cards allow you to shed penalty cards by correctly stating the character’s cause of death, which is also on the back. If you use any of the orange words, you can discard one of your penalty cards. This is judged by the player to your right. There are variations of the game to make it last a shorter duration, or further raise the challenge by locking character decks with certain tombstone columns. Overall, it’s a fun history and trivia game to play with friends, despite the morbid subject matter…or because of it, if you’re a rather peculiar individual.