Trick-taking, where a hand of cards progresses by one player leading a suit and others following, matching that suit if they can, is so old that its origins are lost. The earliest one we have records for in Europe is called Karnöffel, and it dates from 15th century Germany, but playing cards generally are far older and were developed in the far east. Such is the popularity of this mechanism that it’s still with us, and has blossomed into thousands of different forms, many of which you can enjoy with a standard deck of playing cards.
Needless to say, such a popular method of play has also made its way into any number of more modern, more specialized and more strategically rich games, and it’s those we’ll be focusing on to pick out the best. Designers have been able to adapt it into myriad forms, across competitive and cooperative play, and by marrying it with other mechanics to create longer games. But the real trick of trick-taking is that it’s so familiar that almost anyone can pick up and play these games with ease.
Wizard
Trick-taking is an old concept that dates back to playing card games, so it makes sense to start with this relatively old game that mostly uses a deck of standard playing cards. The magic comes from eight extra cards, four wizards and four jesters. The first wizard played always wins a trick, while jesters are the lowest value and are beaten by all other cards. While that not sound much like sorcery, Wizard also uses another common feature of trick-taking games: before each round you must bid the number of tricks you think you’ll win, and must match that number to score. The wizard and jester combo make this notoriously hard to predict, but also leaves you with the strategic flexibility to play defensively or offensively in attempts to shore up your score, or push for a sudden, thrilling win.
Skull King
Pirate-themed Skull King is the captain of the bidding game ship. There are three normal suits alongside a trump suit and, as usual, the highest card wins a trick. You start each hand looking at your cards and predicting how many tricks you’re going to win, scoring points if you hit the target but losing them otherwise, ensuring each hand comes down to a thrilling climax. But the deck is full of special cards to give the game some serious spice: pirates always win a trick, escape cards always lose and the terrible skull king himself lords it over everything, gaining a bonus if he scoops up any pirates. They’re easy enough concepts to learn, but fill the game with more than enough variety to ensure there’s lots of skill in making your bids.
Sail
Staying with the nautical theme, Sail sees two of you working together to steer a ship across a course of islands while being chased by a ferocious kraken. It’s notoriously hard for trick-taking games to work as two-player games, but Sail’s ingenious ruleset not only manages it, but ensures a white-knuckle ride on every game. Each card has not only a suite and a value but also a symbol, and the pairing of symbols determines what your ship does that round, whether that’s moving, firing on the kraken or taking a smash from one of the thing’s tentacles. The round ends when one player wins five tricks, meaning you’ve got to balance the load while still taking the right action pairings, a task made doubly difficult by a ban on communication. Every attempt is an edge-of-the-seat challenge across six scenarios.
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
If you want a cooperative trick-taker for more than two (this one ended up on our list of the best four-player board games as well), then it’s time to venture into the depths of the ocean as you attempt to keep your team alive in The Crew. The game plays through a long sequence of narrative scenarios of increasing difficulty, giving you more and more tasks to complete from a random and imaginatively varied selection. The basic formula is that a given player has to win a trick containing a particular card, but the concept blossoms into all kinds of demanding challenges, for example winning or not winning particular suits or numbers of tricks. This would be easy if you could share what’s in your hand, but that’s not allowed: you can only offer elusive hints. Success is thus a matter of tracking plays and trying to engineer situations where you can complete your assigned tasks. It’s harder than it sounds, highly addictive, and its cooperative nature makes it superb for family play.
Brian Boru: High King of Ireland
Most of the games on this list are fast-playing games, but Brian Boru is a rare instance of a much deeper strategy affair that uses trick-taking. Players are competing to become the next King of medieval Ireland by controlling towns on the map, but control of any given town is decided by playing cards from your hand, which you’ll have picked via drafting at the game start. As usual the highest card value wins, from the suit matching that of the town you’re vying over, but there are some cool wrinkles. First, there’s a wild white suit that matches any color. Second, the lower value the card, the better rewards you get whether you win the trick or lose. This spatial control element married to those cunning inverse rewards give this a unique and engrossing strategic feel, while trick-winning is full of tension.
Cat in the Box
Bidding games don’t come much more bizarre than this beauty, inspired by Schrödinger’s famous feline thought experiment. On the face of it, it’s a normal trick-taking game where you follow a color suit, one color is a trump, and the highest-value card wins. The twist is that the cards are not colored: you decide what color a card is as you play it. That pairing is then crossed off a grid because, after all, you can’t have two cards of the same color and value, right? You can even decide, at any point, that your hand is completely out of a particular color, allowing you to sneak in a trump, but you’ll never be able to play that color again! This can lead to paradoxes where you’re left with unplayable cards, and you lose points. But win or lose, the sheer, head-spinning innovation of this game will take your breath away.
Ghosts of Christmas
Another cleverly peculiar bidding game, this time inspired by Dickens’ famous Yuletide yarn “A Christmas Carol,” Ghosts of Christmas lets you hedge your bets and bid numbers for tricks you think you might win, for a points penalty. But that isn’t its secret sauce. Rather, this is a game where you play hands at once, represented by the multiple time periods of the titular ghosts: past, present and future. Once a given time has a card lead in it, it’s fixed to that for the rest of the hand, so everyone gets a chance to lead, and the unfolding play sees you juggling strategy across several hands from the same pool of cards. Even Scrooge himself might have trouble doing that kind of accounting, although the result is no humbug but a top class, challenging title.
Jekyll vs Hyde
Another trick-taker for two, even if you are representing personalities in the same body as per the classic tale of gothic horror, Jekyll vs. Hyde manages to bring some thematic class to the genre. Each suit represents a negative character trait and, unusually, they’re ranked in the order of which they get played each round and, if a player can’t follow suit, a higher-ranked card will beat a lower-ranked one, a deliciously devious strategic flair. You can also dump out potion cards, which have unexpected effects depending on the suit it’s paired with, resetting the ranks, swapping cards or even stealing a trick from your opponent. But winning isn’t always the point: at the end of a hand, you work out the difference between the two tricks and Hyde advance that many spaces toward his transformation, and victory. If he can’t manage it within three hands, good wins and Jekyll keeps his self-control, but you’ll have a fun time either way.
Inside Job
Imagine a cooperative trick-taking game like The Crew, but with slightly simpler missions and a time limit. Might not sound terribly appealing, but there’s a big surprise waiting in each game of Inside Job: one of the players is a traitor, trying to sabotage the group’s spy missions. Each trick won earns the winner an intel token, and if the traitor gets enough of these, they win instantly. The rest of the agents win if they clear a threshold of successful missions in time. Should neither happen, it comes down to a vote, with the agents winning if they can successfully identify the insider, or losing if not. Blending the best of trick-taking and hidden role games in an easy to learn package, this is genre blending at its most fun.
The Fox in the Forest
Our final specialist two-player pick, The Fox in the Forest is a standard, simple trick-taker with one glorious twist that makes it stand out: you get points for winning either very few or slightly above average tricks, rather than sweeping the board. This necessitates a complete rethink of how you approach the game, as you’re no longer leading to win every time. Instead, you’ve got to consider what your opponent might be holding and mix things up so that you can win the requisite number of tricks to net the big points. To further mix things up, all the odd-numbered cards have special powers like changing the trump suit or the win conditions for a given hand, ensuring this is a game where you always have to think on your feet as you field the constant curveballs that it throws you.
Seas of Strife
As you’ve probably noticed, many trick-taking games take the basic formula and succeed by making a small twist – that’s how addictive the basic recipe is. Seas of Strife, which unusually has different numbers across all its suits, has two. Firstly, you win by losing: that is, collecting as few tricks as possible. Second, if you can’t follow suit and have to dump a card, that card’s suit not only becomes valid but can win the trick if it’s the most common suit played. This makes the obvious tactic of dumping high cards extremely dangerous, and ensures that every hand has the unexpected in store right until the final card is played. At the same time it’s super-easy to pick up, and great fun for all ages.
Matt Thrower is a contributing freelance board game and video game writer for IGN. (Board, video, all sorts of games!)
