Somewhere along the line of playing new trick taking games with my regular group I realized we needed a ranking system of some kind. I asked folks to rank things on a scale of 1-10, and immediately ran into a bit of a wall. That was a bit too fine a grade on things. So we moved to a more simple scale. Is a game Bad, Ok, Good, or Great. And then, is it in your top 3 of the current “season.” This seemed to land a bit better, especially when I brought a score sheet along one week with all the games printed on them to review. 

There was only one problem. Most of these games we had only played once, and we were now reviewing them weeks or months later. So I brought along the whole catalog of what we had played and held up each game to remind folks of how it worked. If they didn’t remember it too well, how good could it have been? And so the Tricky Biscuits season 1 ranking was born. We ranked a total of 18 games, and today I want to review a few of our top picks. It has been a few months since we ranked these and we are nearly complete with ranking our season 2, but given I wasn’t blogging then, and I recently shared my addiction to trick takers I wanted to make sure to share a few of my favorites.

Our favorite game of the season, and one which sort of launched the group itself was Cat in the Box. I wrote about this briefly in my last post but want to cover it here in more depth. The charm and originality of this one is hard to deny. Unlike a normal trick-taking game,  all of the cards in Cat in the Box have no suit. They are all black and white, and can be played as ANY suit with a few restrictions. Instead, players are keeping track of what was played on a central board, and each time a suit color is declared for that card, the player places their token on the corresponding space on the board. Then, players must follow suit, like any other game, or they can declare themselves out of a suit and play something different, including the trump suit, red.

This is immediately strange. Instead of the cards in your hand dictating what you can play, players are more or less making up what is happening as they go along, with the only tangible thing being the numbers on the cards, and what is already marked of on the board. For example, if I play a card and declare it the Yellow 6, that spot is now marked off, no one else can play a six and declare it is yellow. The next player can play any other card besides the six and declare it yellow, as long as that space hasn’t been declared as well. Just like a normal trick taking game, the numbers in a suit begin to disappear after a few hands lead of that color. But just like the game’s name, this is all theoretical. If I want to stop playing yellow early, I could say I don’t have any yellow and play my 7 as a red 7. But the game remembers this, I have to declare myself out of yellow on my player board, and just like a normal trick taking game, I can now no longer play yellow.

This would all be well and good if we were just telling each other what we were playing and following the rules based on the theoretical cards we say we have. But there’s a problem true to the theme of the game. There are more cards in play than there are spaces to claim. There could be 5 or 6 7s in the deck, but only four different suits, four different possible 7s to play. Players discard some cards out of their hand at the start of the round, and don’t play their last card, so there’s some wiggle room despite the excess cards. But if any player is forced to play a card that CANNOT exist according to the games system, e.g. that 5th 7 when all the other sevens are played, a paradox is declared and the round ends immediately. That player scores no points and may have goofed up the other players math by accidentally ending the round early. And so a delightful tension develops, where players are trying to score points, and take control of the hand, but never get so greedy as to flip the game over and cause a paradox.

A second recent release I want to discuss is much more of a party style trick taker. Seas of Strife is actually a new release of another game called Texas Showdown which was originally called… Strife. The lineage gets a bit confusing. Even more confusing, due to a translation error there are two different ways to play the game. But first the set up. This is the only trick taking game I have played where there are no repeat numbers. The ranks keep going up from 0 all the way to 74. There are 8 suits that each a a decreasing number of cards in them from the largest suit of 0-10 to the shortest suit from 71-74. Already, this deck is very strange. The goal in the game is to AVOID taking any tricks. In a round each player plays a card and others follow if they can. Highest card takes the trick. However because of the odd suit structure, if a player is out of a suit they can play any card. The next player can follow EITHER suit. This continues and there can be 2-3 suits in play. The highest card of the suit that was played the most wins the trick. So even if I played the highest card in the game, the 74, if there were more of that low suit, say a 0, a 1, and a 4, the 4 would take the trick because that is the most common suit.

Every trick is a negative point, and so it is really about measuring when to get rid of your high cards in a suit so that you’re not stuck with a trick when that suit is played. The twist in the original variant is that playing the Highest card of each suit nulls that suit from winning the trick. So if in the example above the 0, the 1 and the 10 had been played, the 10 is the highest of that suit, and my 74 would end up winning the trick as the highest car remaining. Seas of Strife thrives at higher player counts, and is fantastic at six players, with the most chaos and most suit shenanigans possible. The printed rules in the box instead have it so that whoever plas and wins with the highest suit can decide who starts the next trick. Definitely less exciting but also a lot less chaotic. Given the high player count I think it’s best to lean into the chaos here.I am thrilled Rio Grande brought it back into print and it’s a very affordable box unlike some of the more niche games in the space.

Finally a personal favorite of mine and one that I played all the way back at Essen 2015 before playing again as part of season 1. Joraku combines trick taking and area majority. The setting is feudal Japan, and each player has a Daimyo, or warlord that they use to try to control one of the 6 regions on the board. Players play a pretty straight forward trick taking game with three suits of cards 1-6 and one ninja in each suit. Players must follow suit, but if they can’t they can play any card. The highest card wins regardless of suit, but 6s are defeated by Ninjas. So far, pretty standard.

The twist is that in addition to winning or losing a trick each card you play can be used to put out samurai in the corresponding region 1-6, or as action points equal to the card number for moving your tokens around or attacking other players. So in essence you are playing two games at once via the trick taking. This is important for two reasons. One at the end of each round the regions score for who has the most presence. But second, when you win a trick you simply do a smaller version of this area majority scoring wherever your warlord is. So while the trick taking is important it only ever scores you points if you are winning your local battle, and it may be better to lose a trick just to shore up a position on the map.

It is amazing to see a trick taking game capture the feel of a small tactical war game, while still ultimately being driven by classic trick taker mechanics. You must follow suit so you can’t always do exactly what you want on the map, but that makes it all the more important to win tricks in order to take control of the card play. The ninja beating high cards gives the card game heart just enough spice too as you don’t want to play your 6 early only to be defeated by a lowly ninja. There is a recent and very pretty deluxe edition which really leans into the theme, but I am happy with my small portable copy as well. Very much worth tracking down.

Look forward to a review of the best trick takers from season 2 in the coming months, and I hope these recommendations are a hit if you have the chance to try them out.

Memory is one of my least favorite mechanisms in gaming. Right behind Roll & Move, which was what defined most board games since Monopoly. But two recent games have taken memory and put it front and center in the game design to hilarious results. And what’s interesting is that each game uses memory to prove the opposite point. So today I would like to review these recent hits: That’s Not a Hat, and Wilmot’s Warehouse.

That’s Not a Hat proposes that our memory is not as good as we think it is. It asks players to hold 4-8 things in their mind, and proves how quickly we can fail at that once the cards are flipped face down in a sort of memory party shell game. In brief, each player is dealt a face up card with a simple drawing. For example, a guitar, a piece of Pizza, headphones and a skateboard. The start player then adds one card face up in front of them, and then flips the card face down and passes it to the player in the direction the card back points to. That next player must say “Thank you for the X” or question it by saying “That’s not an X.” If they accept it, they pass whatever card they have on to the next person, also flipping the card face down. 

Early on, this is easy. You follow the cards around on their journey around the table and try to keep track of what you were just handed, even when it is already face down when it arrives. But at some point, the shell game works and you forget something. Do you trust that you were just handed that piece of Pizza, or do you call the other player out. If you question any card, the card is flipped face up and whoever was wrong takes it as a penalty point in front of them. The penalized player then adds a new card to the set which is merciful as they add a card that’s face up from the central pile and don’t have to remember anything else, just yet. The first player to get three penalty points loses, and that’s the game.

The delight of That’s Not a Hat is the hilarity in how quickly we fail at this task. Early on players will receive a card and immediately forget the card that they had in front of them. Even this pause to think is pretty funny because it immediately makes the next player doubt whatever you tell them. So there’s a that can cover a lack of memory which is bluffing and turning the challenge over to someone else’s memory. Unlike a game of poker, this bluffing can be innocent, that you genuinely believe you are passing what you say you are, or just an educated guess. And at some point, once a lie has entered the system however innocently it can be even harder to keep track of the truth.

The card backs use white lettering or black and the cards always go in the same direction around the table, so there are SOME facts about the cards even once they are face down that might help you keep track, but everyone I’ve played the game with is shocked at how hard this simple task is after a few rounds. It is especially funny when players state that they are passing something from a previous round of the game. Once the cards are face down, who truly knows what’s out there.

On the other end of the spectrum is Wilmot’s Warehouse. This game proposes a memory task that sounds impossible and then helps you prove that it was easier than you thought. Here’s the setup. You and up to 6 players fill a grid with 35 tiles each of which you look at once and then place face down. You are then tasked with a separate deck of cards that contain those 35 and more to match cards to their corresponding tile. You must do it in 5 minutes or less. Sounds pretty tricky right?

Each of these tiles has some abstract art on it. Players go around the table each drawing a tile of the stack, arranged into five stacks of seven tiles, one stack for each day of the week. When a player draws a tile they show it to the other players and discuss where it should go in the grid. The starting tile goes in the center and each future tile must be orthogonally adjacent to a previous tile. But here’s the critical part. Players are encouraged to identify the tile, in spite of its abstract nature, and then fit it onto the board thematically, starting or continuing a story as to how it relates to the previous tiles and why it belongs specifically in that spot. Essentially players are building what is classically known as a Mind Palace about the tiles which then helps the group remember exactly where everything is. The center tile could look a bit like an egg sandwich, which is then above the next tile that looks a bit like a grill, and below a twirling ribbon that represents flipping the egg while it cooks.

The magic trick is that this actually works. And it works better and better the more in depth and internally consistent your story is. But the telling of the story is in itself hilarious. The connections your fellow players make and how everyone can then generally agree to and adhere to the logic that you build together is really something. For a twist, each day of the week besides Monday also has an “ideas from management” card that presents unique challenges for each day. These throw enough of a wrinkle in to keep each game fresh and challenging, and you may be surprised to hear that there are harder versions of these cards in addition to upping the tile count from 35 to 40 if you truly want a challenge. But every time I have played this game it has actually taken the group less than 2 minutes to match every item in the warehouse. Clearly what sounded impossible was actually a bit easy after all.

It has been over a week since I last played and I still remember pretty distinctly where some of those tiles were. But more than that, I remember the overall story and how we briefly became obsessed with egg sandwiches and who was making them, and the rules we made up about making them. That same tile we started with looked very much like a Tie-Fighter to me, and if we had started there I am sure the entire story would have been entirely different and equally wonderful. Wilmot’s Warehouse is not a game for everyone. One player in a recent game gritted their teeth and attempted to remember every tile themselves, not necessarily fun with that kind of pressure. But if you lean into the storytelling and treat it as a group activity it can be truly hilarious and utterly unique.

The two games combined provide opposite takes on memory, but both have been some of my favorites from this year and prove that the mechanism still has some life after all.

This week I want to talk about one of my favorite new games from this year, but one that flew under the radar when it was released in May. Since the pumpkin spice latte is out in the wild and everyone is preparing for Spooky season a little early, let’s talk about Spectral by Ryan Courtney, where we go gem hunting in a haunted mansion. Spectral bills itself as a deduction game, and that’s true, but it has a unique blend of mechanisms in addition to deduction that I think put some people off who typically like that genre. By deduction game I mean something like Clue,  a game where players use deductive logic to find out a specific answer. Spectral has some of that for sure, but answers aren’t always as specific, and there is some luck involved which is often not what deduction fans are looking for.

But first let me describe how the game works in a bit more detail. In Spectral players place out investigators in the spaces between 16 cards arrayed in a 4 x 4 grid face down. When placing investigators between a card you are doing two things at once. 1.) you are claiming that spot, and if you are next to any gems at the end of the game you get a portion of those findings for being next to the card, and 2.) you get to look at one of the two cards you are in between and learn some information about somewhere else in the grid where a curse or gem is. Critically, cards that you see never tell you about that card. Players quickly scrawl this information in a charming investigation booklet so they can puzzle out their next move between other players’ turns. Gems are how you score points, but curses are the most spicy part of the design. Any investigators next to a curse are destroyed, and can’t claim any gems that are adjacent to them. You may think you are next to the same lucrative space as another player, but because of a curse that is adjacent to you, but not them, your bid is lost.

Early on, when the grid is a complete mystery players are only doing this to gain information. But as they learn more they may want to claim specifically juicy spots next to multiple gems, and therefore the claiming becomes more important than the information. When players place a piece it is essentially a bid, like in an auction game. Players can place out any number of their 18 investigator pieces. In order to beat another player’s bid and claim the same spot opponents must play double the number of investigators that are already there. Early on players are placing out single investigators, but as they learn information players may be willing to throw more and more investigators to firm up a claim or kick someone out of a key location. And you can always pass to wait and see where other players go but if all players pass sequentially the game ends.

So what kind of information are players learning? There are four different kinds of cards and each row has three cards that are about where gems are, and one that is about where curses are. The first clue describes where a curse or gem is two away diagonally in the grid. This points to a specific spot as only one location can fit that description. The second clue states that a curse/gem is two away clockwise, either in the inner circle of 4 cards, or the outer circle of 12. The third clue points to a card diagonal from it within that quadrant of four cards. And the 4th clue points to a card that is on the other side of it across the horizontal axis, as if you were folding over the board and it matches its mirror image.

Most critically with these clues is that each row of cards is internally consistent. It is not a setup of 16 cards randomly placed among the 4 x 4 grid. Rows A, B, C and D are each the same four card every time. So if you know even one card in a row you can start making guesses about what the other cards are and what that implies in terms of where things are in the grid. That’s the puzzle in terms of the cards themselves, but the second layer is the social deduction of why players are bidding high in certain places and maybe not treading anywhere near others. Even if you don’t know where a curse is by the middle of the game you might be able to tell by an absence of bids near a card.

The game is great, but I can see why it hasn’t resonated with traditional deduction game fans. It is less deterministic than Clue. In Clue the process of elimination is perfect information. If the candlestick is in one room, it can’t be in another. In Spectral there can be three gems and a curse on the same card. Knowing where a gem is does not tell you that a curse ISN’T there. You are rewarded for the deduction part, but there’s luck involved in what you see vs what other players see before the game ends. I personally think this trade-off of luck vs perfect information is worth it for a few reasons. For one, the game clocks under 30 minutes, and I am generally ok with quite a bit of luck in shorter games in general. For another I think the unique blend of mechanisms set this game apart from other deduction games, and makes it quite a bit more light and interactive. Bidding based on a growing confidence in the information you’ve gathered, combined with paying attention to what other players are doing gives the game a different feel vs other deduction games that are very much heads down puzzles.

On top of all that it plays to 5 players seamlessly and comes in a very small box. Bitewing games has a winner on their hands with this one, and hopefully this review can help more folks discover this unique gem.