"In my understanding, in this trick taking game a player takes tricks regardless of whether he has followed suit or not (in other words, whether a player can take tricks has nothing to do with his following suit or not). Is this correct?"

Answer: " Oh yes. It's very good, if you cannot follow a suite. You can take the card you want without any disadvantage. Because of this it's clever to discard all blue or all red cards before the first card is played. But never discard all yellow cards. In this case it would be dangerous to get the 1 or 2 by another player."

Answer: "Your own tricks score nothing, because the owner of the Bottle Devil should not have more points than anyone else in the game. With the negative points from the discarded cards he gets a few points less than a player who didn't got any trick.

Only the initially discarded cards score negative, because

1. if you get the Bottle Devil at the beginning of the game you have the chance to minimize the points of your opponents by taking tricks. Otherwise the game would be not very funny to you.

2. it minimize the risk to take tricks by using the Bottle Devil. If all your tricks would count negative the right strategy would be: never take the Bottle Devil. And getting tricks would be not important."

Answer: "The function is right (placing on the Devils Trick). With both cards you may construct a standing Bottle Devil.

For this you need a pair of scissors and some glue.

1. You have to cut both cards: not this one card with the number 19, but both with a half hexagon at the bottom.

2. Turn the half hexagons to the front.

3. With some glue paste both at their backside.

4. Then paste the hexagon under the Bottle Devil (at the back of the two half hexagons).

Now you have a standing Bottle Devil and you are willing to excuse my broken english.

5. After playing you put this standing Bottle Devil in the middle of the cards. So it will have it's place in the box. (For this you should cut a very little from the hexagon foot, because the box is a little too small)

Enjoy Bottle Devil and ask me whenever you want.

best regards

Guenter"

"I'd like not to cut the hexagon, so I have got to invent another way to keep and carry the standing Bottle Devil safely in the box, while placing it in the middle of the cards...How about making a slit on the bottom side of the box to enable the "extra" parts of the hexagon to stick out of? Then wrap the whole box with a soft cloth or sponge or something like that to protect the sticking-out part of the hexagon foot. Sounds funny?"

"Well, actually, last week I made the standing bottle imp out of the cards and altered the container box by making slits on it.
Yeah, last Wednesday's lunchtime was a handicrafts hour! I enjoyed working with scissors and glue very much :)"

"Finishing the construction, I found out that making a slit of about 1.5 cm long on both the lid and the main part of the box is a must for allow- ing the hexagon foot to peek out of the box comfortably ;-)"

Toyohiro Wabuchi: wabu@din.or.jp

Just a word about tactics

"Just a word about tactics.
You wrote that discard red or blue cards is good but not yellow cards.
It depends :
1/ if you have only the lowest yellow ones (1,2) or (1,3) you have little chances to get bad ones."

Answer: "yes, you are right. Discarding low cards is good in any way. I meant discarding all higher yellow cards (9 and up, maybe 7 ?) wouldn't be good, because you may get a single 2 or 3 from your neighbour. And with a single 2 or 3 it may be fatal if you are forced to follow the yellow suite."

"2/ Even il you get one low card (1,2) there is only 3 yellow cards above the initial bottle value so in a four-player game, play directly your card (if it's a 1 especially). You have good chances another player gets the bottle for a 9,11, or 13."

Answer: "Yes, I didn't thought about that fact (I just think: do I've a real chance to win Flaschenteufel by playing with you?). But you can only play in this way, if you're the player who starts the game. If somebody else starts the game, the red 18 or the blue 15 will be played, because these are value tricks. (If you've the 15 or 18 it wouldn't be clever to reduce the price by playing a yellow card)."

"I want to add that I've played Flaschenteufel (until now) with different rules. I've found it in OYA, a Parisian boutique specialized in German Games, which translated wrongly the rule about negative points. All cards were counted negative, so the bottle was really a hot one.

I shall try the real rules to see what it actually changes in the game. Anyway, these "Parisian rules" are really interesting because you can "come back" in the game even if a player is far ahead, if you collectivily succeed in giving him the bottle, he can make a -80 score while in "your" rules (s)he "only" steps back a little."