Three great new trick-taking games

Spring Cleaning, Xylotar and Seers Catalog highlight a strong year for card games.

Oct 02, 2024

2024 has been a year in which I’ve played some absolutely tremendous card games. My first play of the legendary climbing game Haggis came in January, and it’s now a real favorite. Charms and Inflation! featured heavily in my early-year plays with family. Crisps has become an addiction, just like its namesake.

These three games, each released in 2024, have been standouts among a crowded field. They are not the only great card games I’ve played that were released this year, but they are three of the very best. This week’s entry rounds out my short (in length, not in word count — I’m sorry) ‘great games from 2024’ series that I hope to make a feature of my autumnal coverage. Unfortunately, it feels like autumn is still a season away out here in the 100-degree Arizona heat, but I’ll delight in the comfortable winter weather, just you wait.

These three games each feature a unique twist on their mechanical underpinnings. Spring Cleaning is a refreshing take on the can’t-rearrange-your-hand trope popularized by Scout, Xylotar takes trick-taking and hides your own cards from you, and Seers Catalog forces you to reconsider when you want to shed your hand.

Spring Cleaning

Most shedding and climbing games feature a sort of family resemblance. From Tichu and Haggis to Five Three Five and SCOUT, the family of games play with a lot of similar ideas beyond simply getting rid of the cards in your hand. You might be able to play melds of cards of stronger strength over those of your opponents at lower strength; you might be able to play melds with more cards over those of lower cards. That’s the basic premise of most climbing and shedding games.

Spring Cleaning feels different. I mean, not that different, because it’s absolutely a climbing-shedding game. It features what’s become a common mechanic in this trick-taking sub-genre: You can’t rearrange your hand. Not generally, at least. That’s been common here since SCOUT, but it’s hardly the only game to do it now. But that inability to rearrange isn’t what makes Spring Cleaning great.

No, it’s that you can sort of rearrange your hand by putting cards out for offer. Thematically, Spring Cleaning is about spring cleaning, and putting cards out for offer is basically giving other players the chance to take your stuff for free. Good community building, you know. See, if a player takes your card on offer, you don’t get any compensation, but you do get rid of a card. Shedding? More like garbage day.

When following a trick, any player can use one or more cards on offer in constructing their meld. Do you have that 6 you need for a 3-4-5-6-7 run that’s somehow nearly assembled in my hand from the off? Great — I’ll take it Maybe you have four 6s together, and adding a fifth from your offer would let me beat my four-card meld. Super! That’s the idea here. Cards on offer are appealing and alluring. One person’s trash set on their curb is another person’s treasure.

Once you’re out of cards in-hand, you’ll take all the cards you have on offer and put them in your hand. That incentivizes you to put out cards that others might want, as you won’t have to take them back off the curb. But you might also equally want to keep cards in your offer that you know you’ll be able to use after running out of cards, and finding the balance is tricky. There’s a little more nuance for you to discover — when you take pick up offer cards and add them to your hand, when you offer cards and what cards you should offer — and I think you’ll enjoy doing so.

Designed by Jonathan Cox, published by Little Dog Games, an imprint of New Mill Industries. Spring Cleaning plays 2 to 5 players.

Xylotar

Polar bears, keytars — what’s not to love? Xylotar is a trick-taking game in which you can’t rearrange your hand — because you can’t see your hand. You can see the back of your hand — and each of your cards does feature a suit on the back — but you cannot see the front, which is where you’ll find the rank of your cards.

When Xylotar starts, your neighbor gets to look at all your cards and sort them for you. It’s a kind thing, really. Neighborly, even. All you’ll know is that your cards are sorted in order, and you’ll know the suit of those cards. In this must-follow trick-taking game, you’re just sort of guessing as to the value of your cards until you have enough information for deduction.

I’ve left something out, though. How do you score points? In Xylotar, you’re trying to hit a bid, and you’ll bid with one of your cards. Not that unusual an idea, really, until you consider that, uh, you don’t know your cards. You’ll have to place a bid (otherwise you’ll automatically bid at the end of the round based on what you have left, and that’s a terrifying prospect), and you’ll be doing it from this hidden information hand of yours. Figuring out how exactly to bid is a trial-and-error process, and you’ll constantly be trying to hedge your bets.

Whether or not you meet your bid, you’ll earn one point per trick you’ve won. If you meet your bid, you’ll earn five more points. As a result, you’re given multiple pathways to earn points. You might find it advantageous to shoot for winning a bunch of tricks, amassing points just by sheer volume. Or perhaps you’ll find that you have a bunch of low-value cards and have accidentally bid with a 0 card — can you avoid taking any tricks and still earn a respectable number of points?

Xylotar is such a cool game. The designer of the game, Chris Wray, has some really interesting designs out there, and I’m always hoping more of them hit the market. I can also tell you with reasonable certainty that he’s not the FBI director — he told me himself at TTUTCON this year. (He volunteered the information, though. Hmm. Is this a ruse?) He’s self-published a handful of great trick-takers, and Xylotar is the first to hit the mass market.

Designed by Chris Wray, published by Bezier Games. Xylotar plays 2 to 5 players.

Seers Catalog

This list, as you can tell, is focused on trick-taking and climbing-shedding, and Seers Catalog is, yes, another climbing game with a twist. And it’s a twist I really like! I like to think of trick-taking, writ large, as a platform upon which you can build all sorts of interesting games, and this one does just that. In Seers Catalog, you’re aiming not to be the first person out (or at least not necessarily) — you’re aiming to have a single high-rank card in your hand at the end of the turn.

Seers Catalog describes itself as an ‘almost-shedding’ game, and that’s a great little introduction to the game. Each card remaining in a player’s hand is worth a negative point, so you’re incentivized to try to get cards out of your hand. You’ll do that by leading and playing melds to a trick, which can consist of singles, sets and suited runs. It’s a pretty simple set of melds you’ll play here, but that simplicity masks the game’s best idea.

When you have fewer than six cards remaining in your hand, two things happen. First, you’re eligible for a bonus — hooray! The bonus is the lowest-ranked card in your hand — that’s positive points. You’ll still get the negative points for the cards remaining in hand, but that bonus is pretty nice. It might even help you win the game. But, uh, hey. There’s a downside — well, two downsides. The first is that artifact cards (more on that soon!) and wild cards are worth zero points, so they can very easily become the lowest-rank cards left in your hand. That means you really have to use those natural advantages. The second is that once you have fewer than six cards left in hand, you are obligated to play to tricks, and you cannot optionally pass. If you can make a play, as much as it pains you, you’ll have to do it.

That’s the great twist here. Say you’re playing a four-player game, you’re down to five cards, and your neighbor leads a single card. How about a 2? Yeah, I think a 2 works here. OK, so they play that 2, and you would have to follow with a single card, but you’ve strategically left one high-value card in hand. Maybe you’re safe! You don’t have to play your highest-value card, you just have to play a meld that ranks higher than the one last played. But now consider your neighbor leading with something higher — maybe an 8. Maybe you have a pair of 10s you’re hoping to play together. Maybe you have to give up a card in the middle of your suited run you’ve squirreled away. Maybe you’re trying to keep a wild around to have one last shot to play in on a meld and leave just one card remaining, and now you’re obligated to play your wild.

Seers Catalog forces you to make difficult decisions, and then it takes away your ability to make those decisions at the moment you’d most like to. It’s such a cool concept, and it forces you to think about trick-taking and shedding in a different way. The game is given a slightly more chaotic dynamic with artifact cards, which provide you with any number of different single-use abilities. They’re dealt out at the beginning of the game separately from the rest of the deck, so you’ll always have two artifacts and one wild card. You might be given a card that’s just worth five points at the end of the round. You might be able to play extra cards to a meld. You might even be able to pass the lead — a highly sought after thing in a game like this.

I can’t say enough good things about Seers Catalog. It spawned from designer Taylor Reiner’s Of What’s Left, though this one adds significantly more variety in the artifact cards. It’s a polished climbing game that’s still pretty accessible — there’s no complicated teach here, and in a niche that can betray the accessibility of a card game easily, you need games like Seers Catalog.

Designed by Taylor Reiner, published by Bezier Games. Seers Catalog plays 2 to 5 players.

Thanks for reading Don’t Eat the Meeples! If you’re interested in playing Spring Cleaning with me on Board Game Arena (it plays great at two players!), my username’s moonty — just drop me a friend request and propose the game. I’ll be there.

Next week: Spooky season!