top of page

Bag-O-Loot

20210502_213541jj.jpg

A game of snitchin-snatchin, lootin-hootin fun!

2-6 players ages 8 and up can play this game of set making, set stealing, and Bag-O-Loot making.

Overview

  • Players are dealt eight cards each.

  • The remaining cards left in the middle of the table as a draw pile.

  • You make sets of matching cards and place them in front of you.

  • You can steal sets from other players with a matching card.

  • A completed set is five cards (a Bag-O-Loot) and cannot get stolen.

  • Wild cards (looters) can be used as part of a set.

  • You can take a wild card from another player. ("Snitching")

  • Play all your cards to end the round.

  • Highest score wins.

Strategy

The strategy comes from knowing when to play and when to hold back. Because you are limited to three plays per turn, you don't want to get stuck with too many cards left in your hand when someone goes out.

Rules and Instructions:

The Making of Bag-O-Loot

I think it was the winter of 1990 when my daughter and I were sitting around one night and wanted to play a game. Tired of games like Monopoly and UNO, I suggested we invent our own.  We took out some playing cards and got to work. 

We both liked to play Rummy 500, so we took that game and added a twist... What if you could steal sets from the other players? Then we decided that you would only make sets of matching cards with no runs and that a "completed set" would be called a Bag-O-Loot and could not be stolen. 

The basics of Bag-O-Loot were born. I wrote our rules on a piece of paper and tucked them away for "someday".

Bag-O-Loot 2.jpg
bag and raccoon.jpg
Coin.jpg
coin.jpg
Final Rules Page 1.jpg

Ten Years Later

As my daughter was getting ready to graduate high school and we were looking toward college and college tuitions, I remembered Bag-O-Loot. I thought to myself, "What if I could make and sell the game she and I invented to help pay for her education? So I dug up the old rules and got to work. 

The Gold Bag

 

My wife was the one that came up with the idea of packaging the cards in a little draw string bag. I remember hand stamping the first couple hundred games with the Bag-O-Loot logo and making little plastic display baskets in our living room. But what a great idea she had - it made the game a perfect stocking stuffer. And once we found a manufacturer to make the shiny gold bags it was a real attention getter in the stores.

bag-huge.png

Huge Success

That first Christmas sales were amazing. We sold over 5000 copies of the game thanks to a catchy jingle, a TV commercial, and those awesome shiny gold bags. Two of the local Walgreens stores let me sell them and it became the highest selling non-advertized item in the store. This set my expectations very high for the coming year.

Disaster Struck

I immediately got to work for an even bigger year in 2011. I changed the packaging so they could sell in more traditional retail stores and ordered (gulp) 50,000 games from the manufacturer. 

But as the Christmas season approached, my order never arrived. Delays in production and shipping left me unable to get the game out to retailers in time for the holiday season. In January I had 50,000 games, nowhere to store them and I was out a ton of money.

Classic-Front.png
New-book-Cover.jpg
Junior-Front.png
Snitch-Plush-With-Bag.png

The Book and Plush

Not being one to ever give up, I looked for ways to recover in 2012. We had made a full sized costume of the Snicth character on the back of the cards to march in parades and promote the game. He was such a big hit, my wife suggested I write a children's book about him.

So now I set out to self-publish a book to go along with the game, and as if that wasn't enough, we made a plush toy of Snitch and a Junior version of the Bag-O-Loot game.

Armed with this array of new products I was ready to go for the holiday season but at this point I was out of money and could not afford to promote or advertize. Sales were fair at best - we sold another 10,000 games and a few hundred books but that was not enough to cover all the money that had been spent.

If my wife had not talked some sense into me I might have mortaged the house and gotten further into debt trying to recoup my losses. We sadly made the decision to sell off most of the inventory for pennies on the dollar and call it quits.

10 Year Anniversary

Ten years after the initial release of Bag-O-Loot I decided to update the game and re-release it. In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, I though this might be something people would appreciate while being stuck at home.

The rules were simplified and the packaging went back to the original gold bag and Bag-O-Loot is once again available for sale, but only on this web site (for now.) I am relying on word-of-mouth and social media to promote the game, so if you get one and like it please tell your friends!

Bag-and-Cards-Ten-Years-Of-Fun.jpg

Links:

Copyright 2019,2020,2021 All Rights Reserved.

bottom of page