The rise of imported trick-taking games
Plus: a discussion on "the Root of trick-taking games," TRICKTAKERs.
If you’ve been hearing the words “trick-taking renaissance” being thrown around, or if you’ve noticed that there are simply a ton of new trick-taking games taking your attention, you’re not alone. There legitimately are a lot of very interesting trick-taking games vying for attention.
Among those is one that some have described as trick-taking meets Root. I see where they’re coming from with this one. It’s TRICKTAKERs, a Japanese trick-taking game designed by Hiroken, which has had an interesting life to date. It’s a trick-taking game with asymmetric player abilities, and reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. (I haven’t played the game, largely because I don’t yet own it — I’m a backer on the Kickstarter, though, so I’m very much looking forward to getting it played myself. Also, it’s being released alongside the hit climbing/shedding game Haggis — it’s a great pairing!)
This is the first time it’ll be released with English text, and the group publishing it, the Portland Game Collective, has been the online home for translation efforts. Those efforts were spearheaded by Ryan Campbell, a member of PGC and one of the hosts on one of my favorite podcasts about trick-taking games, Trick Talkers. (There aren’t many of those, if that surprises you. It’s also just one of my favorite podcasts — Ryan and Patrick are excellent hosts)
Last week, I sat down virtually with Ryan to talk about trick-taking games, TRICKTAKERs, and a whole lot more. The interview’s been very lightly edited for clarity and style. We go into a bit of depth here, and I hope you enjoy Ryan’s great insights on one of the areas of the board gaming hobby that’s really captured my attention the last few years. The interview follows this photo of Five Three Five, a game published by PGC.
Matt / Don’t Eat the Meeples: Why do you import games? What makes that compelling to you?
Ryan: I feel like that's a question that can be answered multiple ways, some more dangerous than others. The biggest thing I think was just the exploring phase of seeing these new types of games that aren't more available in the U.S. specifically.
Obviously most of my answers are all going to be my own take on it. Being in America., you don't see a lot of these games. being able to find another part of the world and discover all these games that are being designed and created and published was really cool, and knowing that you could have access to them, whereas 10 to 15 years ago, it was near impossible to get. With the different importers, we have the processes that make it really easy to get these games now — it makes it so easy for anybody to grab and just being able to click of a button and import a game, the same way you would clicking a button on buying a game on Amazon or something.
We've seen trick-taking grow in popularity over the last three to five years, right? With The Crew taking off, with Cat in the Box having almost-mainstream success. Where's that coming from?
Yeah, it's funny, because I know this is actually a rather controversial topic, because if you ask a lot of mainstream media board game media specifically, they'll say we're in this trick-taking renaissance. People who have been playing trick-taking games for a long time are like, “no, actually, it's been around for a while. It just happens to now be hitting the mainstream.”
Not that I'm trying to say one side is right or wrong. I absolutely would agree though that more people are seeing more trick-taking games, and it was right around the time when The Crew came out and made a big splash and started catching a lot of people's attention. Like you said, Cat in the Box with its Colossal Edition now and its insane plushies. You know, Bezier Games is a good publisher to have if you really want your game to be printed multiple times. I see Cat in the Box having a lot of success for many more years to come.
And again, I think it's great. I know there have been a lot of really good trick-taking games that again came out even before The Crew that deserve more eyes as well. So I just think at this point we've hit that spot where now that we're gonna get more people to at least take a chance on trick-taking that might not have. We're going to see more people playing them and more of them get talked about.
I mean, we're seeing Shut Up and Sit Down discuss things. We're seeing Dice Tower cover more of them. I mean, they would probably be the one who covered trick-taking in the past more than most. We're seeing No Pun Included — like I saw Efka (of No Pun Included) post a picture of Muscle Taking, a super obscure imported Japanese trick-taking game. So it's really cool that we can see more coverage of these games from people.
Japan appears to be a hotbed of innovative trick-taking games with interesting mechanics. How much of that is driven by a small community that we have insight into?
I think with the board gaming culture in Japan, the fact that they're really into small box card games first and foremost is a probably a bigger reason why trick-taking and smaller card games are more prevalent over there, versus here where we love big minis — big everything. It allows the community to be more focused on those types of games and help design and iterate and reiterate those different types of small box games.
When you're worried about shipping costs in today's day and age, that gets really expensive. When you're getting these small box games, the price, the weight and the overall cost is going to be a little bit less, and it makes it easier for these games to make it across the world. So opening up our eyes, you know people in the west, the westerners if you will, having more access to this game and continuing to open that community across the world.
I think it's a little bit easier than with some of these bigger box games, because there are plenty of other big box games in Japan. I know HacKClad is a really successful game. There's another Discord server I'm in where they discuss that game a lot, but you don't hear that really talked about in the quote-unquote “more mainstream” of our group (PGC), or anything that's (focused on) trick-taking because it's a little bit bigger of a box. So trying to get that and all of expansions is gonna be more of a time commitment and money commitment.
So speaking about big boxes and small boxes. There's often been this perception that a small box game is a filler game — a card game is a filler game — but obviously trick-taking communities, I think, feel differently. Where do you land?
I'd say probably say I'm in the more it's not a filler card game, but that's probably just because of bias in how much I play these games, and I definitely have a different eye on it. It's a little harder when you wear it close to your sleeve and and have literally dedicated game nights to trick-taking, so you're playing three or four of them in a night, but you're filling the entire night with it.
The thing is, though, there's so many trick takers out there that you could easily find one that's not a filler like many traditional card games. You can easily play for three, four hours, and they're even really designed to be played for three, four hours minimum. It's just more modern trick-taking is what most people are used to, and those ones are designed and assumed to only be played two, three, four, five rounds — a couple hands here and there — which unfortunately makes it more of a filler game than a full night game.
TRICKTAKERs
Something like TRICKTAKERs, in which you obviously have plenty of involvement and plenty of knowledge around, kind of bucks that trend a little bit, right?
Yeah, that absolutely would fill more of the full game night style game. I'd think the weird part about it though is that a game of just the base game of, it could be done in 10 to 15 minutes if everybody knows it well enough and you can skip over rules teach. You can actually play that game really quickly.
But the fact that there's so many different strategies around the different characters you draft, the fact that each round and over the total course of the game, are you going for a gold crown win, a black crown win, a points win. There's a lot of different things you can do where it's really easy to be done with a game and immediately want to play again, and that's before you even include the expansion or Little TRICKTAKERs or anything. Once you start adding in that stuff, it gets wild.
I'd love to talk a little bit about your experience with TRICKTAKERs, especially with the Kickstarter happening right now. Were you the first person to do paste-ups in English for TRICKTAKERs?
My memory’s a little fuzzy on the exact timeframe when it happened. But basically the game had been out for about a year — the original Japanese version. And only one or two other people (in the PGC Discord server) actually bought the game. I kept asking, “Hey, does anybody know anything about this?” Because there's so much Japanese on the cards, I didn’t really feel like spending 90 plus dollars to get this without knowing if at least one person's played it or has some more information. Nobody did, so I kept asking month after month. Eventually I was like, “you know what, screw it. I'm just gonna get it myself see what it's all about.”
At that point, I went through the process of doing all of the English paste-ups. There wasn't anything at that point. And once I started it, we eventually got a hold of Hiroken, the designer of the game, and told him I was doing these paste-ups. The way I was doing it was literally scanning the cards and then like photoshopping out the Japanese and putting English over it. Hiroken was super kind and actually sent me the high-res original version so I could like have a blanks late to work with so looked a little bit more professional.
Know and at that point it then led to making all the pay stops and then fast forward a while. We get to the official English version, which I've redid the original paste UPS to make them more and more official.
How does it feel to have a game that, while you didn’t design the game, you have a hand in its official release?
It feels amazing. It's super cool. I know like you said, I didn't do the original design of the game. There were a few of the character tweaks for like the Collector and the Ruler that I did, and the Resistance was some more Hiroken, who helped a little bit with it.
The rulebook in general, I feel really proud of. I completely overhauled the rulebook to include a lot of things that people are having constant questions about, whether it was online being asked or when I was playing in person — just things that I kept noticing people are always having concerns with and various tweaks, like the Berserker card for one in the original game. It's a black card which would always confuse people thinking it was a part of the black suit, so I changed it. It's now colorless, which matches the rare and white flag card, so people know that it can be played at any time. Just minor tweaks like that. And the cardboard components, I redesigned all those myself as well. So yeah, just it felt great to be able to help create something and knowing that it's going to be out there in the world for people to enjoy.
I think it's really interesting that that the designer gave you those files originally, because a lot of designers might hold on to those. Certainly a lot of publishers would hold tight to those. But here he's sending somebody an ocean away the files to basically support the play of his game.
Yeah, and I think that just sort of goes back again to the the Japanese culture and community in the way they share and make these games. DUEL BOY, which is a whole other thing we could talk about for easily a couple hours, is something else I've gotten into recently. I did the same thing when I was making the official English paste-ups for it. I reached out to Masato (Uesugi), the designer for that game and told him my plans of making English paste-ups. Without any questions, he just sent me the high-res PDF files for it, to be like, here use these, they’ll be better.
So I just think they're more focused on getting more people to play their games than it is necessarily about money, money, money, and commercial success and that regard, which I think is great. I mean, obviously, you still want your game to have some success and get paid for all the hard work you're putting into it. You shouldn't just have it completely free, but the fact that they're so ready and willing to just be like, yes, make sure more people play this game. It just speaks volumes, and it's really cool to see.
Thanks, as always, for joining me over here at Don’t Eat the Meeples, and a special thanks to Ryan for taking the time to chat with me. First, a few links relevant to today’s newsletter, which you might have also found inline.
Ryan’s one of the hosts of Trick Talkers, a fantastic podcast about trick-taking and climbing card games
He’s also one of the hosts of Duel Boyz, a podcast about a game he’s helping bring to English-speaking audiences
And finally, check out TRICKTAKERs and Haggis on Kickstarter. PGC is doing great work, but they’re a small operation.
My conversation with Ryan didn’t stop at these questions — I’ll share more bits from our discussion over the coming weeks and months.
Next week: It’s officially spooky season! I’ll share some of my favorite games for this time of year, and who knows — maybe I’ll have a spooky story or some horror movies that should be made into board games. You’ll have to subscribe to find out. (And I’ll have to write it to find out. Mystery is fun, but I’m not intentionally trying to be overtly mysterious.)