Some games are too good a gag to stay out of print. Guillotine, the gleefully morbid card game where you play an executioner jostling for the most valuable noble heads, is coming back for the first time since 2005, this time under the Avalon Hill banner.
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Set up your group for freeIt is a quick one. Two to five players line up a queue of doomed nobles, each worth a different number of points, then take turns playing action cards to shuffle the line so the juiciest aristocrat reaches the blade on your go. A round, sorry, a "day", ends when the nobles run out, and after three days the player with the grisliest collection wins. Games run about half an hour, which makes it a tidy filler or a gateway for ages 12 and up.
Designer Paul Peterson, who later created the cult genre-mashing deckbuilder Smash Up, first released Guillotine through Wizards of the Coast on Bastille Day in 1998, a cheeky touch for a French Revolution theme. It won that year's Origins Award for Best Traditional Card Game and has spent the years since as a perennial "why is this still out of print?" recommendation.
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See how it worksThe new edition, debuting at Gen Con before a retail release on 1 August 2026, keeps the classic ruleset intact while refreshing the card art and swapping in a chunky 3D guillotine for the table. At a $19.99 recommended price, roughly £16, it is an easy impulse pick.
With Bastille Day falling on 14 July, the timing is almost too neat. If you fancy an excuse to gather your group, set up a themed game night on Backseat Gamer and let the heads roll.
Sources: GamingTrend | ICv2 | Wikipedia
