Hello my name is Jeremy and I am addicted to Trick-taking games.

“What the heck is a trick taking game?” you might say. Chances are you have already played one. Although which game may depend on where you grew up. Popular games in the U.S. are Spades, Hearts, Pitch, Pinochle, and Euchre. Essentially a trick taking game is any card game where all players play one card each “trick” and the highest or best card wins. Players must usually follow the color of the first card played limiting what they can play from their hand unless they are out of that color. The winner then  “takes”  the cards and leads the next round, hence “trick taker.” Oddly enough I did not play many of these games growing up but came to be fascinated by them much more recently.

The fascination started simply enough. The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine was a game of year winning co-op trick taking game that I got into with my regular game group. In the game players draft what cards they are going to try to take throughout the hand and then cooperate with limited communication to accomplish these goals. So for example maybe I want to take the blue 5 and someone else wants to take the yellow 7. Each of us has to figure out how to get those cards into the right trick, and if anyone ever fails a mission the round is immediately over and players have lost. The cooperative nature of the game reinforced the fundamentals of trick taking as you are trying to coordinate with the other players to accomplish things you usually attempt alone in competitive trick takers. Things like: Becoming void on certain suits (e.g. none of a certain color in your hand so you don’t have to follow what was lead), tempo control when to take or pass the lead. We quickly devoured the 50 different scenarios in that game and then moved on to its sequel The Crew Mission Deep Sea that introduced more complex goals for each hand and endless variety compared to the simple goals in the first game. And so I got a bit of class in a genre of games I did not grow up playing.

Sometime later a favorite podcast talked about an odd trick taking game from Japan, Cat in the Box where, similar to the Schrödinger experiment cards have numbers but can be any suit as long as that number and suit combination haven’t been “observed” so far this hand. The game made its way over to the US for English release, and I began to explore what other strange examples of the genre were out there. The dangerous answer is… there are hundreds; and new ones each year. I found some like-minded souls who were eager to explore these games and we’ve been digging through them and assessing our findings for a little over a year and a half. There are 13 games in the queue and more on the way as the releases show no signs of slowing down.

To be fair, there are worse habits, but this one can be a bit expensive. I turned a bit green when I realized these unassuming little card games had made up one third of my board game budget last year, sometimes costing 30-40 dollars for a simple card game. The cost to component ratio, especially with smaller import games is certainly a bit out of whack. But I couldn’t be happier to be exploring a few of these each month and I wanted to try to summarize the appeal and maybe one of my recent favorites to illustrate why this part of the hobby is flourishing.

The best place to start is that common language that The Crew taught me. All trick taking games are a variation on a central set of mechanisms, and core strategies tied to those mechanisms. Each time the Tricky Biscuits™ and I sit down there’s a set of questions that tune folks into the game. Is it a Must-Follow game e.g. when do you have to follow with the same suit. How many suits are there and what is the make-up of the deck. Is there a trump suit that beats other cards, and how and when can you play it? And finally the most important question: How do you score points?

From this description the games might sound like they would get kind of samey. In a way that’s the appeal, and in other ways it’s amazing how inventive things can get within such a consistent genre. On the “samey” side, the advantage is that you are not reinventing the wheel each time you play a new game. How to play well is a different story, but after one hand of cards in any of these games you are well on your way to at least some level of competence. They are also often short, most are over in 30-45 minutes, so even if you have some rotten luck or bad early hands while getting the rules sorted out you’re not in for a multi-hour affair. And unlike its bigger board game cousin’s the game is usually easy to learn right from 2-4 pages of rules, vs the 20-30 page manuals some modern games demand. Samey is a virtue in this regard, in the same way pizza is still the greatest meal when it’s what you crave. Simple but pure.

But the inventiveness of each game is really impressive as well. Here are a few of the more wild elevator pitches of recent games: Trick taking with a mini mancala system to determine the strength of the suits. Trick taking to play an area control game on a central map. Trick taking with train companies and stock values determined by the different tricks. Trick taking where you can’t see your hand of cards other than knowing the suits printed on the card backs and that they are arranged in order. Trick taking where everyone must play different suited “heroes” to defeat an evil villain. Asymetric trick taking where everyone has a different goal each hand and special powers to accomplish this goal.

These are some of the more outlandish pitches, but given the small number of rules in any trick taking game even the slightest rules change from the well known patterns makes a big difference. What if second place won the trick? What if there were no suits and each card was just another digit in an increasing number? What if you could change the numbers on your cards like a digital clock by adding segments to turn that 5 into a 6?

Given how much of my last gaming year and foreseeable gaming future is contained in these types of games, I’ll be writing about them a lot in the coming months in addition to regular blogs about other games. For now I will just cover my most recent favorite: Schadenfreude.

Schadenfreude is a game that true to it’s name is about enjoying others misfortune. It is a deck made up of four suits, with no trump suit. Cards range from -3(!) to 9 with a wild 0 and 10 that will match any suit that was led. So far, so standard, other than those odd negative numbers. There’s a central score board and one rule above all others. Second place wins. This means both second place in individual tricks and overall in the game. The scoreboard goes to 40, and the moment someone goes over 40, whoever is closest to 40 wins. What this means in practice is that you laugh as you stick a friend with enough points to launch over 40 and try not to be launched over the threshold as well!. When you win a trick, you take the card that you won it with as well as any off-suit cards and they go in front of you as your score pile. At the end of the round you score the face value of all the cards in your score pile.

So you want to score points, right? Points are how you win, after all, you won’t be anywhere near 40 if you don’t score any points. The answer is, it depends. You really want to score points until you really don’t. There is a bit of a release valve built into the design in that if you ever take a card with a number that you already have in your score pile both cards are discarded. This can be both really funny when you slip an 8 into a trick knowing that it will blow up the 8 your friend just took last turn, but it also means you can Houdini yourself out of some points that you really don’t want to take by carefully playing your cards into a cancel.

Schadenfreude is a raucous good time filled with laughter and groans in equal measure. It’s a game that almost anyone can play but has some depth hidden underneath the chaos. Unfortunately it is one of those imports I mentioned earlier and is not widely available in the US. There are some import shops that have it in stock as of my writing this and there’s also the option to import it directly from Japan but the sticker shock and hoops to jump through make it less accessible than I’d like. I promise to also cover some more widely available titles, and as this genre gains more popularity many of these coveted import games eventually make their way over through US publishers big and small. There is also usually a way to play any of the games I cover in these articles using a standard deck of cards or two, with a little bit of elbow grease and a permanent marker.