Six more great trick-taking games
Trick-taking games are being released at a fast clip. These six are some of the many games worth your time.
Trick-taking: It’s all the rage. I think. I honestly don’t know anymore, if we’re being open about that. I do know that I love trick-taking as a game genre, and I have a great time playing trick-taking games with people of all sorts. I play them regularly on Board Game Arena, I lug a slew of them along with me when I travel, and I usually have a few in my game bag if I’m not traveling.
I don’t think I’m alone in that. Where the world of board and card games can sometimes veer too far into big productions, card games, and particularly trick-taking games, which use well-established mechanics and patterns, can be a real breath of fresh air.
So, here we are. Six more great trick-taking games for your consideration.
Xylotar
Trick-taking as a vehicle for playful innovation is one of the highlights of the genre, and Xylotar is an excellent illustration of that concept. This one, designed by Chris Wray and previously self-published as Magic Trick, conceals information from players and revealing information to their opponents. A round starts with one of the opponents sat next to you sorting your cards for you and arranging them face down — but the face-down view shows the suit of the card, as well as the relative strength of the suit.
That public information is your only guide to understanding your hand. It’s a simple twist, but it’s one that places some interesting demands on players. Can you figure out the strength of a card based on its position? What will you learn once it’s played? Confounding things further, you’ll have to play one of your cards to declare a bid. Can you figure out how many tricks you might win despite not knowing the numbers on any of them? Good luck!
Designed by Chris Wray, published by Bezier Games, who provided a copy of the game for review.
Nokosu Dice
One of the best-regarded trick-taking games that’s still a bit harder to import is Nokosu Dice, which merges dice and cards into an elegant little box. This must-follow game starts with players drafting dice, which players will later play to tricks, meaning some tricks will end up as a combination of dice and cards. The last die remaining in front of you also represents your bid for the number of tricks you’ll win. It’s a wild little game, and you’ll spend a good deal of it wondering if you’ve torpedoed yourself.
Nokosu Dice’s scoring likewise is interesting: Every trick you win is worth one point, and you’ll also earn points based on how many other players have met their bids. If you’ve met your bid in a four-player game and nobody else has, that win would net you 30 points. It incentivizes both meeting your own bid and disrupting other player’s bids, but with publicly visible dice, the game also gives you the opportunity to be disruptive. Oh, and you can also bid zero — but it’s even more valuable than winning tricks, so bidding zero will make you an even bigger target than it did otherwise.
Finally, throw in Nokosu Dice’s method of determining trump (the last die in the dice pool isn’t drafted; instead, it’s set aside) as both a color and a number, and you’re in for a really fantastic time. Even if you lose very badly.
Designed by Yusuke Matsumoto, published by Engames. This one’s a bit hard to find. Sorry!
Enemy Anenome
Perhaps the simplest game on this list, Enemy Anenome is a must-not-follow trick-taking game in which the player who plays the lowest card gets an anenome card, which boosts a card’s value by one (or two, if you get two anenome cards.) The fact that this is arguably the simplest here is not a slight. Must-not-follow is not a trick-taking mechanic you see every day, but it works here, and it doesn’t complicate matters. The highest card played to a trick wins, the lowest gets that boost. Simple, really.
Except there’s more. If you aren’t able to play — and given this is a must-not-follow game, there’s a very real possibility of that — you’ll discard a card from your hand into your score pile. Short-suiting becomes not just a viable option for success, it becomes a great way to earn points when you might not otherwise. Cards with the values 3, 5 or 8 are worth an additional point, too. Those two factors combine to make this a game where having a bad hand isn’t quite so damaging.
Yeah, it’s a fairly simple design, but it’s one that just works. More importantly, it feels unique among trick-takers — there are more must-not-follow games out there, of course (though not many — I’ve played Potato Man, Aurum, and Tricky Time Crisis, and the only other games I can easily find listed are VIVO and Master of Rules. It’s a niche within a niche!), but few feel as elegant as this one. Plus, the art! The art’s awesome.
Designed by Daniel Newman, published by New Mill Industries. There’s a new edition up for preorder right now.
Rebel Princess
If you’ve played Hearts — and if you’re a child of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and you were fortunate to have a computer in your home, and you were (unfortunate? fortunate?) enough to have Windows on that machine, you probably played Hearts. Especially if you just got tired of Solitaire or Freecell.
Rebel Princess is basically Hearts, but not with just one twist. It’s Hearts with a bunch of twists each time you play. Each game, you’ll take one of the available princesses, who provides you an ability that you can use once per round. Those powers might allow you to swap a card in the trick after it’s played, change the priority of trick winning so low cards beat out high cards — that sort of thing. Each round, you’ll play with a different round card that will change the way the round progresses. Maybe you’ll have to follow with odds if an odd is played, or maybe you’ll win a trick if you play an off-suit card.
But the premise of the game is still essentially Hearts. The 8 of Frogs is our Queen of Spades, and the Prince suit is essentially the Heart suit. You still want to avoid collecting points, which you’ll earn from collecting the aforementioned cards. The rounds and princesses add a real twist to the game, and I think it generally works pretty well. It’s a bit more chaotic as a result of all that, but that’s not an inherently negative judgment.
Designed by Daniel Byrne, José Gerardo Guerrero, Kevin Peláez and Tirso Virgós; published in a Deluxe Edition form in North America by Bezier Games. They didn’t provide a review copy of this one — I played ##
Yokai Septet
Sevens. That’s this game in a nutshell (sort of.) This is a trick-taking game in which the only cards that truly matter to you are sevens — not sixes, not eights, not anything else. Sevens. That’s the heart of the game, but of course, there’s more to it than that.
In Yokai Septet, there are a bunch of suits. How many? Seven. Each suit has a different progression of ranks, and there are (you guessed it!) seven cards in each suit. Each suit features a 7-rank card, which the game calls Boss Yokai. If you manage to collect four of those before your opponent, you’ll win, but only if you can do it before you win too many tricks. That’s the twist here — you can’t win seven tricks. You’ll lose if you do. Neat, right? Right!
Plus, this is a partnership game, but it’s still a plain-old trick-taker. A lot of classic games pull that off, but not too many modern ones. You can play teamless at three players, and there’s also a very cool two-player variant designed by Sean Ross, designer of Haggis and a bunch of other great games.
Designed by yio and Muneyuki Yokouchi, published by Ninja Star Games in English.
Trick-Taking in Black and White
The last game today is also the hardest to find, I suspect. I’m sorry about that. (To be fair, Nokosu Dice is also hard to find.) Trick-Taking in Black and White is sort of described by the name on the box: Basically, you’ll be playing to a trick with cards from your hand. Those cards have two values on them — a white suit value and a black suit value. The lead player determines which suit is being played, and everyone must follow suit. The numbers on each card sum to 37, and there are 36 of them, so you’ve got one for every different potential sum.
But the interesting bit is in how you score points. The game doesn’t want you to win a bunch of tricks in one color. It wants you to win an equal number of black and white tricks. If you do, you’ll earn points for each trick you’ve won. If you win an unequal number of black and white tricks, you lose points for each trick you’ve won.
Designed by Tsutomu Dejima, published by Decoct Design in Japan.
Hey, thanks for reading! I’m always glad to see you’ve stuck around, dear reader. And to the new readers — thanks for making it this far, even if you scrolled all the way to the bottom of the post and didn’t read anything else. You’re all great.
I don’t know what I’ll be writing about next week, and I usually tease that here. Maybe I’ll write about games that are just pure fun. I kind of want an excuse to talk about Rafter Five. We’ll see!