![]() There are also games that feel like trick-taking games, but in fact, they are not. Instead, it says it’s about hand management, which I don’t think properly describes it. What’s funny is that on Board Game Geek, Brian Boru isn’t listed as having a trick-taking mechanism. Sometimes you intentionally lose a trick, just so you can carry out the action you wanted. It’s basically action selection via trick-taking. Just look at Brian Boru, where trick-taking is used to decide which action players can carry out and in what order based on the card they played and whether they won the trick or not. Other games add a lot of other mechanisms and trick-taking is just an engine that drives a much wider game experience. That’s a really clever twist, in my view. If you get it right, you get points, even if you only won a single trick or none at all. ![]() The most important thing is that you correctly predict how many tricks you’ll be taking this round. Everyone plays for themselves here and it doesn’t really matter if you have been dealt a really good or a really terrible hand. Skull King, for example, adds a bidding phase. Some games add other mechanisms to trick-taking. The idea that you’re temporarily working as a team creates a really positive atmosphere that other games should try and incorporate. ![]() I think there are two really clever ideas here that I would like to see in modern board games: even though there is one winner at the end, you do work together for some of the time and for some of the game you’re not sure who you’re working together with, which means you have to play for yourself, but be ready to help your partner as soon as they’re revealed. While in Skat it’s clear from the start who plays alone against the other two, in Doppelkopf and Vivaldi, nobody knows immediately who they’re playing with. In Skat it’s one against two, Doppelkopf two against two and Vivaldi two against three. However, even though they’re ultimately competitive games, each round is played in teams. Whoever has the most points at the end is the overall winner. What all of these games have in common is that, you play them over several rounds, usually agreed at the beginning, but often you just decide when to finish as the day or evening goes on. It has a fixed player count of five and is based on a traditional Italian trick-taking game. Vivaldi is a game that I only learned about in the last few years. As I mentioned before, Skat and Doppelkopf are card games I grew up with and they require exactly three and four players respectively. Many of these have a fixed player count, following the traditional approach. Then there is the myriad of competitive trick-taking games of course. It also means that sometimes a bad decision can be cancelled out by a useful card. It’s for exactly two players and adds special card powers, thereby making decisions about what cards to play when much more interesting. Treat them as proper learning games and hopefully, the concepts of trump, following suit and everything else starts to make sense to everyone.įox in the Forest: Duet is another great cooperative trick-taking game. Officially, you’re not allowed to talk, but for anyone who doesn’t know anything about trick-taking, it makes sense to play your first few games completely openly and talk everyone through why you might want to play in a certain way. As it’s a cooperative game, you are learning together. That meant that I could also use it to teach my games group about trick-taking. It’s a game that works really well with only two players, but of course, goes up to five players. The first cooperative trick-taking game I came across is The Crew. So that trick-taking games can be fully cooperative is an exciting idea for me and meant I was able to introduce my wife to this genre of games that’s so close to my heart. They’re basically team games, where it’s one against two, two against two or maybe one against one. Traditionally, trick-taking games are semi-cooperative. The first thing I want to mention is cooperative trick-taking games. So I love to see modern games developing this mechanism further and incorporating it into other mechanisms, creating completely new game experiences. Traditional trick-taking games sort of have their own language. I’m used to the idea of suits, trump, following suit, taking tricks, gleaning information from what cards others play and much more. ![]() Growing up in Germany, I started playing traditional trick-taking games like Skat or Doppelkopf from a relatively young age. ![]()
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