Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
Paris! The city of lights, the city of romance, the city of cabaret!
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Read the full game description
Paris! The city of lights, the city of romance, the city of cabaret! Entertainers from all over the globe come to the city in hopes of becoming a star of the famous cabaret stages. Talent agents like you are there, too, looking for the best acts to sign to their agency. In Cabaret, players are talent agents putting together performers for cabaret shows throughout Paris. The performers come from a variety of genres: singers, dancers, comedians, jugglers, musicians, and magicians. In game terms, a hand of twelve cards is dealt to every player. The start player leads any card they like. The next player can play any card they want except that they CANNOT follow suit. Then the next player can't follow either suit, and so on until each player has played one card, with these cards comprising the "trick". Whoever played the highest card wins the trick, taking all the played cards, adding them to their score pile, and starting a new trick by playing any card. A hand continues until each player has played all of their cards, then you score cards (each card has a value on it) that you've collected and the game continues for three hands. Between hands, you take all the cards, shuffle them up, and deal them out again.