Musings on… Trick Taking Games (#32)

Edited By David Fair
May 1, 2006

Welcome to Musings On..., which is a moderated discussion group in which a bunch of well known, dedicated gamers discuss and debate different games and topics regarding games.  In this particular article, they discuss Trick Taking Games.

David Fair:

One of the first card games I ever learned to play was Hearts. Such a simple idea: play a card, high card played wins the trick. Winner leads to the new trick. There are a lot of games that play similarly, each game somewhat different than the last; usually you must follow suit if you can, there could be trumps, scoring is modified, etc. I have no idea how many variations there are on this basic game, but BGG lists 358 games and expansions with the Trick-Taking mechanic.

What amazes me every time I learn a new one of these games, is how yet another designer has made some minor variation to scoring, game play, suit following, whatever, and ended up with a game that plays so very differently. No one will ever confuse Flaschenteufel with Sticheln with Poison with Tichu, etc.

I was going to write a definition of what a trick-taking game was for the two of you out there reading that have no idea what I mean, but I found this great one at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Trick-taking games are card games with a distinct and common play structure: Each round of play is divided into units called tricks, during which each player selects one card from his or her hand. These games compose one of the most diverse and prolific genre of card games — they are played on every continent, and have existed for centuries. One theory regarding the prolific nature of the genre is that they are popular because of the relatively intense play complexity — including both psychological and mathematical elements — that emerges from a relatively simple structure.�

This is a great definition that really sums it up for me. The game structure is simple, the play requires careful hand management, precise timing, reading your opponents, and the whole game ends up being intense and enjoyable.

Jason Little:

Despite my love for boardgames, traditional card games (or contemporary games with “roots� there) remain my All-Time Favorites. Especially trick taking games. The hand management of trick taking card games is a subtle science, rewarding long term play and familiarity, while offering a simple rule set so anyone can dive in and learn.

What I enjoy so much about trick taking games is the ability to eventually immerse yourself in the game and rely on instinct and experience, allowing you to still socialize while playing competitively. And the experience carries over very well into similar games. Once you know Hearts, for example, it’s much simpler to grasp games such as Wizard or Instinct.

Speaking of, Wizard is my single favorite card game, followed closely by Tichu. Both games are incredibly rich with strategic play and tension despite their great differences.

Wizard is wonderful because of its accessibility—the basic gameplay is very easy to pick up if you have any experience with trick taking games at all. But the inclusion of Wizard cards (above trump, auto-win trick cards) and Jesters (below suits, auto-pass cards) adds a whole new level of subtlety and decision making to the game.

I love trick taking games which have the added feature of bidding or trick betting—where the player either bids a certain number of points/tricks to secure lead and call for trump, or needs to make a bid (# of tricks) they must reach to score.

Trick taking games fill an important niche for me: games I can play with my wife and my relatives. I’m always on the lookout for new card games that can introduce 1 or 2 new elements, while still retaining the feel of a classic trick taking game.

Climbing Games: Climbing games (Tichu, Gang of Four, Dalmuti) are a wholly different beast, in my book. They rely on a slightly different skill set and ability to evaluate card/hand strength. I think, in general, climbing games are a step up in difficulty or complexity than the majority of trick taking games. This is not a bad thing, but does prevent the above games from going over well with my casual gaming friends.

Tom Vasel:

I don’t think that Ladder Climbing games should be included in this category any more than Bang! or Magic the Gathering - they’re another beast altogether.

Alfred Wallace:

In many circles, I am recognized--with plaques and everything--as the Worst Trick-Taking Game Player of All Time. And that includes Tichu. When I first played Tichu, I realized that it was an excellent game of its type, but that I could never play it again. I was SO horrible.

I suppose what I’m saying is that I have no grounds to comment on trick-taking games, as they are as beyond my ken as is the Space Shuttle to a seagull.

Larry Levy:

I, too, love trick-taking games. Bridge, in particular, was the major focus of my gaming life for almost fifteen years. Ten years ago, between the traditional trick-takers I’d played and the trick- taking games I designed myself, I figured I’d seen pretty much everything possible in the genre. Then I was introduced to German games and I realized how wrong I was. The designers were playing with the very foundations of these games and yet the results were some truly remarkable designs. And good new games continue to appear.

I list five trick-taking games in my personal Top 100 (Bridge, Schnäppchen-Jagd, Flaschenteufel, Was Sticht, and Control Nut). In addition, Mu would probably make it if I could ever devote enough time to learn the intricacies of this game. I continue to have a soft spot for Pinochle, a childhood favorite. I also think that David Parlett’s Ninety-Nine is a very good design.

Let me join with the chorus in saying that Climbing games should be considered to be separate games from trick-takers.

Frank Branham:

The charm and skill involved in a trick taking game is something that I hate to see dismissed as “just a card game� by a lot of spielfreaks. The gameplay is usually very simple: play a card from your hand, (and bid), but the rules and strategies governing that can be much more involved than even the most complex of gamer games.

Bridge is my favorite of the traditional games. The core gameplay involving a dummy is quite deep even before ornate rules and guidelines for bidding. I truly adore AH’s Challenge Bridge. It is like playing all of the really hard and rare hands that really test your skill.

Climbing games are truly a form of trick taking game that only really break two core rules: 1. Tricks don’t end after every player has played one card. 2: You can play more than one card. There are so many variants on the basic trick taking form, that these alterations are not as extreme as some.

As to overrated games. Rook is probably not highly rated, but it has so many things wrong with it. 140 of the 200 points in a hand are contained in the top 7 cards--bidding strategy is reduced to a weird guessing game of whether or not high point cards are in the widow.

Larry Levy:

Ack! Frank’s post made me realize that I had forgotten all the very innovative games designed by my very talented friends. Frank’s Dia de los Muertos (later published as Four Dragons) was one of the first games I played that really messed with the very foundations of trick-taking; it’s a mind-altering, brain-burning game that really stretches your gaming muscles. Ty Doud’s Victory & Honor is much the same and is a supremely challenging game; you ain’t seen nothin’ till you’ve played a game with three simultaneous tricks! And Joe Huber’s Transportation Tricks (which I’ve played as Cola Wars) is also extremely clever and innovative. I’d include all these games among my favorites (and V&H is in my Top 100--I don’t know how I left it out). Efforts like these really show just how much room there is for innovation in the old trick taking game.

Craig Massey:

Wow, this is no small topic, but one that I personally find to be interesting. If created my personal top 100 games of all times, there would be a significant number of trick taking games that would make the list.

Favorite trick taking games include Five Hundred, Sheepshead, Spades, Mu, Flaschenteufel, and Oh Hell as the tip of the iceberg. Several of these are staples during family gatherings and holidays. I can remember my grandparents hosting Five Hundred parties. I played Sheepshead throughout college for quarters which were extremely valuable for laundry money. I’ve tried Bridge and am sure I would love it, but I find the time required to really learn the game a bit too daunting.

I am continuously amazed at all of the variations of trick taking games that pop-up. Many of them see play once and then get ignored. But more than other genres of games, I find that many of these games have a lot to offer beyond the first few plays and frequent play will be rewarded. Given the number of times I have played Spades, it is amazing that I still see new things in the game. I have no doubt that this would hold true if I played Mit List und Tucke as many times.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a trick taking game that really doesn’t work for me, though I’m sure there are some. I’m rather nonplussed by Wizard as I personally feel that Oh Hell (Nomination Whist) is really the better game. For me the wizards and jesters detract from skilful play and bidding, but I’m probably a minority on that count.

I do not consider climbing games to fall under the trick taking umbrella. For me they require a different set of skills and thought processes. The deserve to be in their own category and seem only tangentially related. I realize that a number of trick taking game really bend the genre (Dia de los Muertos and Twlight come to top of mind), but the still feel functionally the same as a game like Spades. Climbing games don’t feel functionally the same.

Tichu is a game I enjoy and admire, but don’t love. It certainly has much going on and is the deepest of any climbing game I have ever played.

Jason Little:

As a really big fan of trick taking games (and card games in general) as well as a fairly obsessive game collector, I was surprised at how many games have been mentioned so far that I’ve never played or even heard of.

So please help me out here—as an avid card game player who generally plays these sorts of games with casual players (in-laws in particular) what would you recommend as other trick taking games to look into if games such as Wizard, Hearts and Pitch have been staples? Are they readily available or out of print?

Other card games I get to play with this group (to provide some comparison for complexity levels) include Coloretto, Bucket King, RK’s Vampire, RK’s Poison, Too Many Cooks, Peasantry and Five Crowns.

What would be some good trick takers to introduce? Thanks!

Shannon Appelcline:

Lately, Four Dragons is the trick-taking game that I keep coming back to. I’ve gotten several good, commercial trick-taking games is the last year or two, but there’s something about the deduction required in Four Dragons that makes it stand out.

As for climbing games, I think they’re a clearly different form. Frank claims there are only two differences (tricks don’t end after one card, and multiple cards can be played at once). There’s more though. You don’t have to play when it’s your turn, players will end up with different number of cards, and the victory is different then any other trick-taking game because you’re trying to empty a hand of cards rather than collect or duck points.

Further, I think climbing games require totally different strategy as a result. Taking “tricks� can set you up to empty your hand more easily, but it’s not always required, and you definitely don’t want to jump to your “trick-taker� in most cases.

If anything, climbing games are as similar to a pattern-matching game like Uno or a hand-building game like Poker as they are to Spades or Hearts.

Frank Branham:

Shannon...In your reviews of tricking taking games, you classify a few of them as Advanced Trick-Taking Games. I’ve always pondered about some of the weirder aspects of some of these...especially Mit Liste und Tucke and Twilight. Neither really actually has very complex rules--but they require a totally new set of skills and tactics that actually may level the playing field between experienced and starting players.

Twilight does have some card memorization, but suit management, ruffing, and the usual sorts of things and are replaced by weird, alien concepts that require at least 4 or 5 plays before you kind of see them. Or maybe you are just driven insane by the repeated plays.

But are these games really advanced, or just alien?

Larry Levy:

I’d say alien more than advanced, although all these games also require a good deal of skill. I would include Schnappchen Jagd in this group and would certainly include Flaschenteufel. The weird, groundbreaking concepts in these games mean that they have a pretty steep learning curve, regardless of how much experience you have with other trick-taking games. I find the new ideas exciting, particularly when they add up to a great game.

But if these games are alien, Dia de los Muertos is from Alpha Centauri (and is much the better for it).

Shannon Appelcline:

Alien’s a fine description of the games Frank mentions, because they’re outside of the trick-taking norm. However, when I’m talking about “advanced� trick-taking games, I’m just discussing the level of complexity.

I was brought up in a card-playing house. My step-dad’s family liked cards a lot, and so Euchre and Hearts were pretty common activities. As such I find most card games pretty simple. I could play them in my sleep, and I could play them pretty well.

Advanced card games are something else, though. They’re brain burners, and they take serious thought. This is typically because decisions are overloaded. You’re no longer just playing high or low, trying to get a trick or not. There’s other decisions that that same card play requires.

So with Four Dragons you have to think of the interactions of the card’s special powers with other cards. With Victory & Honor you’re considered not just what to play, but where to play and who gets to go next as a result. That’s different from an alien game which might be very different, but still simple, say Trumps, Tricks, Game!, which has a very unusual element (keeping the card you take & playing them in the next round), but which doesn’t take much more thought.

Richard Young:

I was introduced to Bridge as a youngster by watching my parents and extended family playing what was termed “party bridge� where individuals followed a card from table to table playing with different partners while keeping track of an accumulated individual score. I soon learned that as an on-looker, or “kibitzer,� silence was especially golden, but I developed a fascination with the game that continues to this day. I have played just about all the versions there are from “kitchen bridge� to Duplicate Bridge and was registered with the ACBL for a time collecting master’s points towards International Grand Master-hood (never got too far along but it was fun while it lasted). Other trick taking variants I have also enjoyed include Euchre (Bridge-lite), Whist (Bridge without the bidding), and Hearts. All pale before the king of card games. I firmly believe that Bridge is the best thing you can do with fifty-two cards.

A great social game used to be available from Parker Brothers called Coup D’Etat but I haven’t seen it around for years. It was a game for four players which consisted of playing a series of various trick-taking games with play money as the prize for each sub-game winner. Once all the games in the series were played the one with the most money won the overall game. You kept track of games played on a plastic board that had depressions in which were placed small pewter-like daggers. A “Director� was chosen by lot at the start who, after the cards were dealt, selected which of the trick-taking variants would be played that round. If the Director won the hand, he was awarded a fee from each of the other players according to a set schedule which was intended to reflect the difficulty of the sub-game chosen. If the Director didn’t “win� the hand, he had to pay a penalty fee to the treasury. There were also ways in which another player could execute a “coup� and take over the directorship. The hook was that being the Directeur allowed you to choose the game after seeing your cards. Of course, the job got harder as the play went on because each variation could only be played once and the range of choices narrowed quickly.

There were six individual games each of which had its own title in keeping with the French “coup d’etat� theme such as “Seige� (take all the spades), “Waterloo� (take all the queens), “Barbu� (take the king of hearts), “Touche� (take the first and last tricks), “Guillotine� (do all of the above), and “Domino� (this one actually was more like Rumoli than taking tricks where the idea was to be the first to get rid of all your cards). I remember my wife and I having many hours of good fun on evenings with friends where we would follow dinner with a few games of Coup D’Etat. If it is still out there somewhere, I highly recommend it.

Frank Branham:

Coup D’Etat is one of two or three commercial versions of a traditional game called Barbu. Lowe published a version of Barbu called Dragonlords with GREAT production values: The cards are all unique and gorgeous face cards, and scorekeeping is handled with plastic “gems�.

Barbu is an even more interesting game because it has zillions and zillions of house variants. There are probably 30 or 40 different hand types that people have created over the years. Some of these are not trick taking games....so you get in the weird space of having to choose which class of card game you want to play after looking at your hand. I think even the traditional game has a Crazy 8’s type hand called Domino.

Larry Levy:

Yes, we had a lot of fun playing Cout d’Etat when I was growing up, too. For some reason, I wasn’t thinking of that as a trick-taking game, but it certainly is one. Maybe that’s because I didn’t care for most other avoidance games in my youth. Hearts left me cold (still does, really). Other trick-takers like Spades and Oh Hell were okay, but didn’t get much play. The one trick-taking game I really enjoyed in my childhood was Pinochle, which I learned from my grandfather (who was an unbelievably talented card player). We played many different forms of it and I enjoyed them all.

It’s funny, but I can see that the seeds for my future gaming preferences were there all along in my early life. I think the thing that attracted me to Pinochle was the additional element other than card play--in this case, the melding. Later on, when I was introduced to Bridge, it was the bidding and the different bidding systems that fascinated me. Thus, I was quite prepared, even though I didn’t realize it, for the many different quirks that some modern designers have introduced into trick takers. Even as a child, I craved variety in my games!

Bridge really did dominate my gaming thought for a long period of time. In fact, when I first started designing my own games, my initial focus was almost entirely on trick takers. I tried numerous angles: games for two, three, five, or six players; games with temporary partnerships; games in which multiple players have use of the dummy; and so on. This fascination lasted for several years and was very much a product of trying to expand the Bridge experience a bit.

Richard Young:

Larry’s memories certainly mirror my own to a large extent. I also inherited a fondness for card games from relatives. Bridge aside, my Grandmother was also a particular fan of Canasta (speaking of “melding�). I don’t remember it as a trick taking game but more a member of the Rummy family, although it certainly had a good degree of depth and strategy to it.

Also like Larry, I was particularly drawn to Bridge’s bidding systems and the precise nature of the formal coded communication between partners that became possible. During my Duplicate years, I was a staunch advocate of a bidding system referred to as “Precision,� a system probably long relegated to the dust heap by now.

Parenthetically (and just a hair further off topic but what the heck), my love for boardgames and games of strategy more likely can be blamed on my Grandfather who gave me an introductory book on Chess and my first set of Staunton patterned wooden chess pieces for my birthday when I was nine or ten…

Larry Levy:

Yes, Canasta is a Rummy game and has no trick taking elements. It’s a very interesting game, though, and one we played a lot growing up. We even played some of the more adventurous variants, that allowed sequences and melds of wild cards. Another example of how the seeds of my love of gaming variety were planted during my formative years.

I’d be shocked if Precision isn’t still reasonably popular. It’s a demanding system, but one that had staggering success when it was first introduced. There were a lot of books written about how to play it. I wouldn’t be surprised if modified versions of it are still being played at the championship level.

Morgan Dontanville:

So far ladder games have been discussed and argued against being used in the Trick Taking category. Well, here is my argument for the inclusion. You lead the “trick�, people are constrained by the lead in the “trick�, if you win you “take� the “trick� into your score pile, note the words “Trick� & “take�. Just because Praying Mantis are big and have faces and are really gross to step doesn’t mean they aren’t bugs.

Craig Massey:

If this were the only things that make up a trick taking game, then by all means, let the praying mantis into the party.

For me though, it is the objective behind a trick taking game that makes it different than the climbing game objective. The goal in every trick taking game I play is to score by either capturing tricks to make a bid for scoring purposes or by ducking them to make a bid of some type.

The purpose of the climbing game is to dump your hand before everyone else does. The winners a losers of the tricks are largely irrelevant with respect to that aim. Yes, there are cards that score in Tichu that you want to capture, but they are incidental to the goal. I say give each their own category and discuss them as such.

Morgan Dontanville:

There was a time in my life when I would play games with a standard deck of cards. When I was young I was turned on to you basic kids games, and then finally got the chance to sit in on a game of Hearts. I liked it, but didn’t love it, perhaps I was too young, but in my mind I recognized that all the previous games I played were vastly inferior. No longer did I have any desire to play Go Fish, Old Maid, Slap Jack or Crazy 8s. Clearly the Trick Taking game was where it was at.

Right around that time I played Gin and Canasta for the first time which pretty much killed any desire to play standard Rummy; but it wasn’t until I played Spades that I really found a game that I loved. This was my first jump into deeper card games and at that point it again wiped out any real interest in the second tier games, Gin and Canasta were trumped.

Soon, it was Spades, Spades, Spades, Spades, Spades, with a game of Hearts thrown in there to confuse the hell out of me. Then I stopped. I moved to a new town, no one I knew there played card games, and I ended up leaving Spades behind. Ten years later, and I still haven’t played Spades again.

The years went by and I started getting into Euro Boardgames. At that point I lost interest entirely in card games. Occasionally, there would be a fun filler that had cards, but even then, I was more into moving pieces around a board. It wasn’t until I played Tichu that I started to become more interested in card games again. I adored Tichu, it took many of my favorite ideas from Asshole (which was only a drinking game to me) and Dalmuti (which was only something that I would play when coerced) and made a damn fine hand management partners game. I forgot how much fun it was to have a partner (although Dune certainly gave me this feeling, but alliances never change in Tichu).

Well, after loving Tichu, I’ve played a number of card games and have come to discover that my disinterest in most card games came from either the luck of the draw, the irritation of card counting, or trump suits that bleed your hands. I just felt that many times I was just throwing some cards out and seeing what happened. I wasn’t finding ways to manage my hand like I had in Tichu. Most of the time, a bad hand was just a bad hand regardless of how you played (which I why the bidding in Spades made the game work for me).

Shannon Appelcline:

I don’t want to dwell too much on ladder games when talking about trick-taking but I have to disagree with one of Morgan’s point. I’ve never played a ladder climbing game where you actually “take� tricks into a score pile.

You do win rounds of play, and the winner gets to start the next round, but the cards involved might as well be thrown into a rubbish heap, because there’s no scoring of them. Instead you score based on how many cards you got rid of, and as I said in my previous comments, that different scoring condition is one of the elements that makes ladder-climbing games entirely different to play.

Frank Branham:

Nice comments here. There are quite a few simplish card games that dismiss with bidding and have traditional suit following rules. I figure that you have to at least have bidding, some alien sort of card play wackiness (Sticheln, Mit List und Tucke, Muertos), or odd multi-way scoring.

That last one is a mechanic I don’t see so much. It forms the core of Cosmic Eidex and Auf Falscher Fahrte. Falscher slowly reveals the scoring method for the round over the course of the first few hands. Cosmic Eidex rates your score in relation to the other two players. The twist in these two is that both games, you are often forced to start the hand keeping the possibility to finish the hand in two different ways. That does bring into play some of the nifty hand management like in Tichu.

There are some quite remarkable mechanics that have popped up from modern commercial trick-taking games. 1. Partial hand revelation. (Control Nut and Mu) 2. Different objectives. (Barbu has one form of this. Was Sticht has every player with a different objective.) 3. Hand drafting (Was Sticht) 4. Systematic crippling of high-ranking cards (That’s actually the part that makes Muertos/Four Dragons work.) 5. Multiple tricks at once (Hat Trick did it first, Victory and Honor does it better)

Morgan Dontanville:

I’m not really sure how other people play Tichu, but while our ultimate goal is to go out, many decisions are made based on the value of what, I guess I alone, call the “trick�. Our games are won and lost by the points we’ve acquired. New players are often surprised when they go out 1st and 3rd and still end up with less points. Good players will allow for their partners to get points when they don’t think that they can close it, and will even taint piles with the Phoenix in order to change the value of the piles.

If I stand alone on this, so be it. If it is important to define a trick taking game as specific point per trick taken, then I will concede to the experts; as I surely am not one in this genre.

Mark Jackson:

Another ladder example [where cards are used in scoring] is Frank’s Zoo… when using the scoring rules for hedgehogs & lions.

Shannon Appelcline:

But Tichu is abnormal in that regard for a climbing game. Gang of Four, Golden Deuce, and The Great Dalmutti all have zero value in winning rounds of play, except in your ability to lead the next round.

Perhaps Tichu has some characteristics of trick-taking game, but that doesn’t mean the climbing genre generally does.

Morgan Dontanville:

Shannon, how do you classify a game like Too Many Cooks, where there is one trick, but the trick ends with a value cap. This game also gives players the ability to throw additional cards in when it comes back around to them. Then there are games like Poison where there are multiple tricks being played with that constraint and 6 Nimmt! where there are multiple tricks being played that are constrained by the number of cards.

Do you think these fall into the constraints of a trick taking game?

Shannon Appelcline:

Both Wikipedia & Pagat define trick-taking games based on one core: the trick. Pagat says, “A trick consists of each player in turn playing one card face up to the table� while Wikipedia says, “Each round of play is divided into units called tricks, during which each player selects one card from his or her hand.� The OED doesn’t define trick-taking, but it does define a trick as “The cards (usually four) played, and won or ‘taken’ in one round�.

By that definition, none of the games you mention meet the criteria for trick-taking because they involve each player playing more than one card, sometimes to more than one location.

However, the definition clearly hasn’t expanded to meet more modern gameplay. For example I have no doubt that Victory & Honor is a trick-taking game, even though it doesn’t meet the precise definition because it entirely feels like a trick-taking game. To be more specific, I think it’s accurate to say that Victory & Honor is a trick-taking game where you play three trick simultaneous.

But the question remains how far you should expand that definition.

I’ve never played it, but I suspect Too Many Cook is one degree removed from trick-taking games. It sounds like it meets the criteria, except players can play more than card to a trick until some constraint is met. Still, I assume they keep playing them consecutively, one at a time, like in trick-taking.

Poison and 6 Nimmt! seem to be at least two degrees removed, as they allow players to play more than once to a “trick�, if you want to look at it that way, and they also have more than one trick. This is considerably different from Victory & Honor where each of the individual tricks still follows the general rules of gameplay: one play per player.

On that same continuum, Tichu is at probably three degrees removed. Here you remove the idea that players play equal numbers of cards, you let plays be 1, 2, 3, or 5 cards, and you remove the idea that each player has to play on his turn; the latter is a pretty big one that none of the earlier games have compromised.

And then you get out to the other climbing games, which are probably at least four degrees removed. Besides Tichu’s issues, these games also have entirely different victory structures.

So I’d say it’s a continuum with some closer to the trick-taking norm and some further away.

Morgan Dontanville:

Thanks, Shannon. That sounds about right. I find that many definitions do not cover the grey scale. In a time where game innovation has become somewhat of a priority, preset concepts are quickly being relegated to fuzzy notions. Personally, I find the grey line between black and white to be much more intriguing.

Perhaps, that is why I’ve never devoted myself lifestyle games like Go, Chess or more fitting for this conversation, Bridge.

It seems that most of my favorite trick taking games are in the grey; or “alien� as Frank dubbed them. Twilight, Hat Trick, Sticheln, and if you count it Tichu.

The trick taking game that I am most into right now is Njet!. One of my issues with many trick taking games is that a good hand is a good hand and a bad hand is awful. Njet! allows for some control over what the value of your hand is. At the very least it helps spoil the other more powerful hands.

In Njet! there are a number of categories and options to how the hand will play out. You take turns eliminating these options. So, if you have no worthwhile black hammers in your hand, you cover the hammers as the trump suit. If you have a bunch of dud cards, you cover the option of “No Discards� this forces a discard to help flush your hand. In addition to choosing the way the cards are played out, the game has you switching partners. The result of the blocks also determines who gets to choose their partner. By the way you block out the options, you also give a tell as to what your hand is like. So, not only is there control, but you can make deductions of what you are up against, so you aren’t just blindly throwing out cards.

Another thing about Njet! that I love are the small hands. There is nothing more exacerbating to me in a card game than getting my hand bled over and over. I feel that I have no control over my play when I can only respond. Games like Tichu allow me to pass to control my position, but the small hand in Njet means that I won’t be forced to follow suit for long.

Recently, I played Sheepshead for the first time, and while it has a trump suit it also has a small hand, so I’m looking forward to playing that again.

Larry Levy:

Let me further muddle the situation with another bit of terminology. IMO, Too Many Cooks is a “rolling trick game�, which is a superset of climbing games. In a rolling trick game, the trick can continue more than once around the table. In some of these games, players have the option of passing rather than playing to the trick.

Climbing games are rolling trick games with two special features: the leader determines the type of trick that is being played (singleton, pair, sequence, etc.); and each succeeding player can only play if they play cards of the same type which are ranked higher than the previous play.

I’m really not sure if I’d say that Poison or 6 Nimmt! include “tricks�. I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said they did, but they seem to be pushing the concept pretty far. Clearly, they’re both avoidance games (like Hearts), but I’d have trouble taking the classification any farther than that.

Frank Branham:

Njet was an interesting idea, but the game didn’t do much for me. Every trick does have balance in that there are never good hands. But the actual hand play seemed kind of uninteresting. The hands almost tended to play themselves---especially since you could guess where the voids were located from the “bidding.�

As far as balance, I think that it could be handled better with a bidding / scoring system like Spades. The best implementation is Duplicate Bridge. A number of identical hands are played at all of the tables. You score in each hand and how well you bid it is compared in each hand only against the other partnerships that played your exact same hand. This means that playing a weak hand well is worth more than playing a powerful hand badly.

Challenge Bridge works the same way, but works by comparing your scores against a number of predetermined hands from tournament Duplicate Bridge games. The evil, evil part is that the selected hands are the wonky ones. The ones where a player has two voids, or someone should be able to bid and make 7 Clubs, but might not realize it. So every single hand of Challenge Bridge is like those terrifyingly difficult hands you get every few bridge nights.

Would it be possible to apply a sort of simple hand rating system to a game in order to balance scores without balancing hands?

I cannot really think of a trick taking game that does it---perhaps the best might be Zum Kuckuck/ Turn the Tide. This isn’t really a trick taking game, but cards are rated on the cards themselves. This doesn’t take into account the power of singletons, voids and long trump suits. Bridge does have a hand rating system that is part of the ornate bidding ritual---but scoring is not related to that hand strength.

Larry Levy:

Wayne Schmittberger gave the rules for a game like this in his New Rules for Classic Games. It’s called Compensation Bridge or something like that and each side is handicapped by the total number of points in their hand. I believe he said the values were determined by a computer analysis.

One of my games is a two-player trick-taker that also handicaps the players based on a determination of the value of their beginning hands. It’s called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and the rules can be found here: http://www.thegamesjournal.com/rules/WYSIWYG.shtml.

Shannon Appelcline:

Njet has another interesting aspect, which also turns out to be a problem for it: dynamic partners. The dynamism can add a lot of variability to the game, and keep things hopping as you constantly adjust to different peoples’ playing styles. The downside in Njet is that you can end up partnered in the last round to the person that you have to beat, and in that case you just can’t win.

Farfalia is another recent trick-taking game that also had dynamic partnerships; it solved the problem simply by saying that the top two scoring players win.

Something else I’ve played in the last year had rotating partnerships, but dodged the Njet problem by having each player play on their own in the last round of play ... but I can’t come up with what that game is now.

So why are partnerships to integral to so many trick-taking games? Is it a de facto but unwritten rule of the form, or has it just evolved due to tradition?

Morgan Dontanville:

I can see why people might have a problem with the endgame of Njet!, but it works just fine if people keep their own score secretly.

Frank Branham:

There are two good things about partnerships. 1. It means that there are fewer players/teams in the game. If you’ve played a lot of the 5+ player trick taking games, you start losing a little bit on control with every player that gets tacked on. I think that Pepper supports like 8 or 10 players, and you just have no control with that many folks. 2. The partnership thing means that your team gets half of the plays, but you don’t know all of the possible plays. This adds to that nifty deduction element of trying to figure out where cards are.

Ideally #2 should lead to nifty forms of partnership communication elements in these games. Sadly, very few games actually include any sort of formal communications between partners. I can really think of only Control Nut, Mu, Bridge.

One idea I have always considered is centering a game around partnership communication. The bizarre partnership poker game Mus has an ornate tradition of signals for your partner.

http://www.pagat.com/vying/mus.html (As a note. Anyone with any interest in card games needs to haunt Pagat. It is worth the trip.)

Musings On… is a roundhouse forum discussion on games and topics related to gaming. if you are interested in participating in future discussions, please email David Fair at dafair followed by the at sign and gmail.com.

Comments:

It’s a bummer that Die Sieben Siegel isn’t more popular. I like that one a lot. It’s not particularly far-out or inventive as far as designer trick-takers go (compared to Flaschenteufel, Twilight, Dia de los M., Sticheln, Mu, et cetera), it just takes familiar trick-taking concepts and makes them a lot more evil. Posted by Joe Gola on 05/01 at 05:55 PM | #

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