The central mechanic here is trying to “shed” all your cards before your opponents. Ladder-climbing games, sometimes referred to as “shedding” games, while not necessarily quite as familiarly imprinted upon our childhood brains, come in the more recently familiar forms of Tichu and Scout. One card played from each player adds up to a “trick,” and whoever wins it, “takes” it, hence trick-taking. One suit may be designated as a “trump” suit, meaning it will trump, or beat, a card of any other suit. If you haven’t, the central concept is simple: a player “leads” with a card of a certain suit, with subsequent players needing to “follow,” i.e., play a higher card of the same suit if they hope to win the hand. If you’ve ever played Bridge, Hearts, Spades, or Euchre, you’ve played a trick-taking game. Trick-taking is the easier to define of the two, as versions of this game have populated our leisure time since we were kids. There has been an absolute boom in games that rely on the primary mechanic of “trick-taking,” or the adjacent mechanic of “ladder-climbing.” If you’re interested in why that may be, there’s an excellent article by Chris Wray that digs into that question over at The Opinionated Gamers which will explain the phenomenon better than I could.īefore we continue, let’s define a few terms. As mentioned (and perhaps coined?) in my recent review of Thrones of Valeria, we are in the midst of a magnificent Trickaissance.
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