Why trick-taking campaign games work
Why are games like The Crew and The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game so successful?
Why is it that of all the high-profile trick-taking games to have seen release in the last five years, four of the biggest have been campaign games? That’s the question with which I’m preoccupied today and have been for the last couple of weeks.
See, like many other folks in the board game ecosystem, I, too, have been enamored with The Lord of the Rings — The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game, a game whose title length is as spectacular as it is unwieldy. It’s certainly descriptive, though, and it does sort of imply a sequel — though we’ll see if it’s the sort of sequel more like The Return of the King was to Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated The Lord of the Rings, and by that, I mean good, but certainly a tonal mismatch at best.
And while that’s the current hot commodity in games, it’s joined on the Board Game Geek hotness list by the 2024 Cole Wehrle-designed sensation Arcs, a game which I woefully have yet to play. It’s very much on the list, so don’t you worry. I’ll get there. At any rate, it’s not a campaign game in and of itself, but there’s a campaign expansion that sort of seems like an essential piece if you’re looking to play the game at all. It’s also not wholly a trick-taking game, but it uses trick-taking as part of a bigger whole. I’ll happily report back in a few months on this one, should the opportunity to play fall into my lap.
So, too, can we look back at 2019’s The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine and its sequel, 2021’s The Crew: Mission Deep Sea. Both Thomas Sing-designed games sit remarkably in the top 100 on Board Game Geek — an accomplishment to be sure, and I think it’s reflective of how great the games are, but I do think it’s worth a deeper investigation.
The top three trick-taking games on the site, which we can use as a source of metrics for understanding passionate board gamers more than the population writ large, are The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, and Arcs. The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is currently ranked 2,068 as of writing, but I’m firmly convinced it’ll be in the top 100 by the time summer rolls around.
We’ll talk through these games to understand how the campaign and trick-taking elements function, and we’ll round out with a discussion on why it works.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine gradually introduces players to strategic complexities over the course of the first 10 missions, starting with a single player winning a single card and culminating with four cards having to be won by individual players (in a two or three player game, some players would have to win more than one specific card).
The complexity, of course, grows, with 50 missions to be won — at least before venturing into the world of promo content. Imagine dropping a player who’s never even touched Hearts on Windows 95 into mission 34 of The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, and I think you’ll understand what it might be like to drop a player into a complex trick-taker without proper backing.
That’s the true magic of The Crew. Yes, the game itself is fun, but the trick-taking itself isn’t rooted in some of the more arcane structures you’ll find in games these days. It’s not like the very successful Cat in the Box, which we’ll discuss for a brief moment. This is a game that wants you to understand one thing: It’s a trick-taking game, and the tricks you take matter. It teaches you throughout the game that you can win tricks in unexpected, interesting ways. It guides and nudges you into learning about short-suiting. It’s a tremendous little game for its lack of complexity and the gentle introduction into important topics in trick-taking.
Designed by Thomas Sing, illustrated by Marco Armbruster and Sensit Communication GmbH, published by KOSMOS.
Sidebar: Cat in the Box
This is not a campaign. (Side note: Are we surprised there’s not Cat in the Box: Legacy? When will we get our first truly successful legacy trick-taker? Hmm. Ideas, ideas.) I’m talking about it here because of its role in the trick-taking boom. It’s the fifth-highest rated trick-taking game on BGG’s top 100, and it’s done really well for itself. There’s even a ‘Colossal Edition’, which I don’t think is, um, strictly necessary. Still, I get the realities of the industry to some extent.
Designed by Muneyuki Yokouchi, illustrated by Osamu Inoue, published by Hobby Japan (Bezier Games in the U.S.)
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
Where The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine succeeded was in a gradual introduction to trick-taking strategy, but that wasn’t on order for its sequel, The Crew: Mission Deep Sea. To accomplish the ever-difficult task of following a successful release, this game dove headlong into chaos. Each mission has a difficulty level, and goal cards are drawn such that they match that level. If you have a level of 5, you might end up with five easy tasks or one difficult task — that’s the fundamental shift that Mission Deep Sea executes.
Perhaps as a result of that shift, this game is ranked higher on BGG — it’s more appealing to hobby gamers, you might say. It’s generally preferred among members of trick-taking communities, in my observation, too. There’s a good reason for that: Those who don’t need a soft introduction are well-positioned for this game from the outset.
The variety here creates more interesting conditions. No longer are you simply trying to win specific cards drawn from a deck; you’re now trying to do things like win more tricks than any other player, win a trick that has only odd numbers, win a number of tricks you predict — and much, much more. As these goals interest and collide, you’re left with a game that has more innately interesting patterns emerging.
Designed by Thomas Sing, illustrated by Marco Armbruster, published by KOSMOS.
Sail / Hameln Cave
Not every campaign-based or cooperative trick-taking game is a magic recipe that will convert new players. Sail, a cooperative two-player trick-taking game in which you play through a series of missions, features a map you move around as you navigate treacherous waters. It’s fundamentally a retheming of the Japanese trick-taker Hameln Cave, which I’ve not played (though I don’t particularly need to. Want to? Sure!)
Sail is a great little game. It comes in a nice little box, it’s relatively easy to teach, and it features gameplay that ramps up in difficulty as you play. Fundamentally, the trick-taking portion of the game doesn’t change. The map changes, and you have to win tricks with greater accuracy and precision, but that almost becomes secondary.
This is a nice game, and one I really like, but I’m think it shows an important piece of how a campaign trick-taker can be truly successful. Not all games must target the same novice market, of course, and this is more a treat for those who’ve played trick-taking games than it is a soft introduction.
Designed by Akiyama Koryo and Kozu Yusei, illustrated by Weberson Santiago, published by Allplay.
The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game
I’m not alone in marveling at this game’s early success. In an interview I conducted last week with Chris Wray, designer of Xylotar and several excellent self-published trick-takers, he remarked on the popularity of this game and how it may have upended what he’d seen as a trend in the genre — a stalling in the trend toward more and more passionate fans of trick-taking. “It could be a second wave,” he told me. I’ll be curious to see what happens in the next year as a result of this game. (My conversation with Chris wasn’t focused on this game, but it came up in a broader conversation about trick-taking and self-publishing games. Next week I’ll be writing about our interview in a bit more depth, so stay tuned.)
I think it’s clear that this game is going to be very well-regarded. We’re not quite halfway through the campaign, but it exhibits what I think makes The Crew so successful.
The Crew worked because it took a very basic trick-taking formula and added layers of strategic complexity. The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game does the same thing. The first chapter of the game is a simple one. You’re introduced to the concepts — there are characters who have goals that need to completed, and those goals are not mutually exclusive. The goals start fairly generic such as to be compatible across chapters of the game, though of course you’ll generally be seeing the same one: Frodo has to win ring cards. Pretty well a thematic idea.
As you progress through the story, the game becomes more difficult, which is certainly akin to Frodo and the Fellowship’s journey with the ring. I’m excited to see the game unfold over the 18 chapters. Yeah, it’s four fewer than in Tolkien’s work, but I think that’s probably alright.
And, if you’re wondering if there are more games planned to round out the trilogy — I don’t know that it’s been officially confirmed, but designer Bryan Bornmueller did drop a bit of a hint about that on one of my favorite podcasts, Trick Talkers.
Finally, if you’re wondering if you know who appears — let’s just say that I think you should play this game. No spoilers and all that.
Designed by Bryan Bornmueller, illustrated by Elaine Ryan and Samuel R. Shimota, published by Office Dog / Asmodee.
So, why does it work so well?
There are several lessons we can take from the success these games have enjoyed. The first is that starting simply is crucial.
Starting simply allows inexperienced players a clear view into the mechanical underpinnings of the game. While there are shifts and shuffles around those underpinnings, the fundamentals in these games remain the same. The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is an exhibit in this with its mission structure largely focused on winning specific cards in specific orders, and while it does add some variety at times, the complexity comes from the tasks growing in difficulty, not by the nature of the tasks changing. So, too, is The Crew: Mission Deep Sea an exemplar, but it wrings out more variety from those tasks. Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game shifts this again, with the attention turned toward a core system and a broader change of your goal structures.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that these campaign games have done enormous work bringing new players into the trick-taking niche. The rise of communities around the hobby, from the BGG Trick-Taking Guild to trick-taking focused publishers like Portland Game Collective, whose Discord server is a hub for both the company’s publishing efforts and a much broader community of passionate trick-taking hobbyists and publishers. None of these communities exist because The Crew paved the way, but they have grown, at least in part, because those games have invigorated players.
I am no different, having really started diving into trick-taking after playing The Crew. I’d played Hearts and Spades, and my parents played a lot of Pinochle when I was a teenager, so it’s not as if the genre was a mystery to me. But I was excited by the modern design, having been diving deep into modern games for some time before that.
There was something about The Crew that opened my eyes to the wealth of designs that were already out there. I had no idea that Maskmen was a really cool spin on climbing games published in 2014. I’d heard about Haggis and how hard it was to find, probably in the BGG forums in the mid-2010s, but I hadn’t played it. There were so many interesting games published in Japan before that 2020 boom — Nokosu Dice, Boast or Nothing, Peter’s Two Sheep Dogs, SCOUT, games like that.
And maybe, in a way, The Crew is a perfect metaphor for my trick-taking discovery. I went from a simple understanding of trick-takers without the full complexity in view, and over the last five years, I’ve been introduced to game after game after game. That’s kind of cool.
Hey, thanks for joining me this week at Don’t Eat the Meeples! I’m really glad you’re here, and I appreciate both your reading and your replies (even if it’s just muttering under your breath about yet another email — I get it!) And thank you to Chris Wray for the interview; I’m looking forward to writing about self-published games for you to read next week. I’ll actually give you a little look at the month ahead:
Next week: Self-published games
Sometime in February: What I’ve been playing in February
And later in February: Great trick-taking games published in 2024
See you there!
I immediately fell in love with the LotR game at PAX Unplugged and I bought it as soon as my FLGS had it in stock. We played through six chapters this past weekend at a convention (though we didn't do well with the "not talking too much" rules). I really need to break out my copy of The Crew. I got it early in my hobby journey and the idea of playing a game that had no talking as hard because I was teaching everyone how to play. Now that I have a gaming group, i need to try again!