If you sat down to design a game about Jack and the Beanstalk, it seems inevitable that it’ll be an asymmetric contest between quick and nimble Jack (from an unrelated nursery rhyme) and the powerful and ponderous giant. If it must be a tableau manipulation game as well there’s no doubt the end result will be something along the lines of The Blood of an Englishman.

If you’ve played solitaire (including more obscure variations), you’ve moved cards around in a tableau. Often the rules restrict you to moving the cards in the front and your goal is to dig out the next card in a sequence in order to build up stacks (foundations) next to the tableau. This is what Jack does in The Blood of an Englishman, though the numbers need not be sequential, just increasing. Thematically, he’s climbing the beanstalk (numbered cards which have increasingly ominous images of vines) to get to a treasure (gold, goose or harp). Claiming all three treasures would require 21 cards and Jack can make three moves a turn. Add in a few more moves because he needs to move cards from front to front or back to front in order to reveal the next bit of beanstalk or the next treasure.

This would be the most boring game of solitaire if there weren’t a giant eager to squash Jack. The giant has one aim:

Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead
I’ll have his bones to grind my bread.

Mixed among the vines and the treasure are eight cards with an increasingly threatening giant. There are two cards each labeled Fe, Fi, Fo and Fum. If these four words ever appear (in any order) at the front of the 5-column tableau or grouped together in a single column, the giant has obtained Jack’s bones. For obvious reasons, that ends Jack’s game poorly. Fortunately (for Jack) the giant has one move per Jack’s three. Unfortunately, that move can be calamitous.

Like the colossus he is, the giant may move four (and exactly four) cards from the front of one stack to the front of another. That can reveal a giant card that seemed safely buried in the stack. Or he can move two cards front to front. This counts as a single move (for the giant) which can waste Jack’s time by covering a treasure or a key number. Finally the giant may discard a single vine anywhere in the tableau, which has an obvious use of limiting Jack’s options as he climbs his beanstalk. It also has a subtle use when the vine card separates two giant cards.

Since every card is visible from the start, this is a perfect information game similar to chess, tablut or the master variant of Torres. Every now and then the cards turn up in such a way as to give the giant an easy victory. So Jack gets a chance, before the game begins, to move a single card from any place in the tableau to another spot. Thematically this is justified as the help of the giantess from the story. It’s such a lovely concept and almost too perfect.

From what I’ve read, people tend to find Jack the easier role. That certainly holds at the start of the game since Jack’s extra moves help him climb beanstalk stacks with little opposition from the giant. He can claim one or even two treasures while the giant maneuvers his cards into place. But each time he takes away a vine card, there are fewer options to hide from the giant cards. So the tension builds and Jack slows down. His moves must be deliberate and constantly watchful for the giant’s tricks.

I can’t be sure, of course, but I believe a patient giant can always defeat Jack. The large moves must be focused on concentrating giant cards almost to the excussion of thwarting Jack’s goal. Yes you’ll lose some gold and a magical golden-egg-producing goose. But there’s always that harp destined to betray Jack. (To be clear, the treasures have no magical powers in the game.) Now Jack’s path to victory is constrained and the giant’s moves can be subtle. No need to bury the next number if you can discard it instead and add more moves to Jack’s progress. Setting up the threat of Fee and Fi in one that can be joined to Fo and Fum in another with an epic four-card move can slow Jack down long enough for the giant to pull off a Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum in another column with discards or single-card moves. And I’m not convinced Jack can beat a giant who’s patient enough to get Jack on his third beanstalk.

Jack’s story has been told for hundreds of years, which means it’s a solid story. But it’s also been pretty well explored. By the time Disney got a hold of it in 1933, it was a brisk 8 minute vehicle for Disney animators to create the Tom and Jerry model with Mickey and the Giant. Mickey Mouse himself frames the action by reading the storybook version to mice children who don’t care for it in end. It’s a story that requires embellishment that’s not so easy to pull off as live-action adaptations have shown.

For better or worse, The Blood of an Englishman follows the canonic story as faithfully as one could imagine from a simple card game. I’d be tempted to suggest “improvements” such as giving Jack special powers when he collects a treasure. But that would break the compelling elegance of the existing rules. Unfortunately those rules aren’t as sublime as Lost Cities, so it’s not the two-player game I’m likely to reach for. Thankfully, The Blood of an Englishman doesn’t take much longer to set up and play than a Disney short. You’ll want to play a second time with swapped roles. But after that the game goes back on the shelf waiting for someone looking through to spot that exceptionally evocative cover and ask “What’s this game like?”

Also published on Board Game Geek.