Best New Table Games of 2023
On this May 4, I wish a Happy Star Wars day to all my loyal fans! May the fourth be with you.
Las week, I attended the Global Game Protection and Table Games Conference at the Sahara in Las Vegas. I enjoyed interviewing all the game inventors and videos about their games. Videos will be released over the next few months. In this newsletter, I’d like to acknowledge the winners of the best new games competition, as determined by votes of the attendees.
Third Place – 3 Dice Baccarat
In third place is Three Dice Baccarat by Galaxy Gaming. At the former Cutting Edge table game show, games by the big companies were not eligible for voting in the competition. The reason was that the competition was supposed to help the little guys break into a tough business. However, this show dispensed with that rule.
Three Dice Baccarat is quite simple. The game is played with two sets of three dice, labeled the Player and Banker. The players (not to be confused with the Player bet) may bet on which set of dice will have the higher total. There is a house advantage mechanism where I think a certain low tie is a loss for both sides. Of course, there is a hedge bet for that contingency.
I hear the game already had a field trial at the Paris and was pulled out afterward. Somehow this escaped my notice, otherwise I would have written a page about it. The Nevada Gaming Control Board has been remiss sometimes in updating their list of field trials and that was the case with 3 Dice Baccarat.
Second Place – Home Run Poker
To be honest, I was shocked when this game got second place. I didn’t consider it a table game, but more of a bonus tacked onto a poker game. I apologize that I didn’t make a video nor even take a picture, as I didn’t intend to give it any coverage at Wizard of Odds. Nor did I think it had a serious shot at showing in the awards as they had a terrible location in the show, in a separate room I think most attendees didn’t know about.
The concept is very simple. A new player to the poker table starts with a runner at home plate. At every new hand, all players had to pay $1 to a pot. The winner of every hand would advance a base. When any one player advanced all the way around and got back to home plate, he won whatever money was in the kitty. At this time, all runners on base got reset back to the beginning.
I’m not saying this is a bad idea, but just not the kind of product I write about it.
First Place – 3 Shot Poker
The first-place winner is the same team from Colorado that brought us the first-place games the last two years and second place before that. If I remember correctly, those winning games were Blackjack Burnout, Poker Burnout and Pocket Rockets. This time their game was 3 Shot Poker.
3 Shot Poker is already on field trial at the Grand Sierra in Reno. See the previous link for my analysis. Briefly, it’s like Three Card Poker, except the player plays three hands at once against the dealer.
Honorable Mention – Mugsy’s Corner
I was in charge of collecting and counting the votes. The ballots asked for first, second and third place choices. Three points were awarded for first place, two for second and one for third. Poor Mugsy’s Corner lost showing in the top three by one point. There were a lot of invalid ballots by attendees who didn’t visit every game, which was a requirement. Had we counted those ballots, Mugsy would have got third place.
Briefly, Mugsy’s Corner is a side bet located where the Big 6/8 usually is. It wins if a total of seven is rolled in the first two rolls, starting with a come-out roll. Please check out the video I made of Mugsy’s Corner from the 2022 show.
At the show this year, Frank was promoting the version of Mugsy’s Corner for Crapless Craps. I address both versions in my analysis of Mugsy’s Corner at Wizard of Odds.
In closing, I’d like to congratulate all the winners and thank Richard Marcus for putting on an informative and fun show.