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.