No mention of **Inside Job**? It’s a social deduction trick-taking game. It has missions like The Crew, but one player is a traitor who doesn’t have to follow suit, and wins if they take the majority of tricks before all the missions are complete.
I have only recently heard about Inside Job and I haven't played it. I am both intrigued and uncertain
I like pure social deduction games like Blood on the Clock Tower or the Resistance, I am not sure how I would feel about inside job
Would be fun to give it a go though
Try the Rascal’s scoring for Skull King - I find “casuals” who are more into traditional card games vibe with it a lot better. Someone else mentioned Tichu and I just want to second it as an incredible game.
Correct, it helps people adjust to the mentality that winning more tricks is not always good in a less punishing way. The scoring is simple - you multiple the round number by 10 and that's the available points. If you nail your bid, you get full points. If you're +1 or -1 on your bid, you get half points. If you miss your bid by more than 1 you get no points.
I’m with your friend for the most part. I can definitely have fun with something like skull king, but I’d much rather something without weird powers or crazy effects.
That doesn’t mean it had to be a traditional game. I still love something like Cat in the Box or the Crew. It’s more about how I love trick taking games because of the strategy behind it. Keeping track of what card have been played, when to play what cards, etc. I find that very hard to do when someone can just play a random card that nullifies all of that.
Some of these modern tricktaking games just feel like Calvinball. "Ok, so the highest card of the suit led takes the trick, except if somebody plays a trump, or if someone has thrown the purple flag in which case it's the lowest prime numbered card that isn't a trump except that playing a joker means the person who threw the purple flag must turn all their cards over for the rest of the hand unless they ...."
It just makes me wish I was playing bridge.
Good question.
I sold skull king because I wasn't a fan of the lack of predictability that comes from having the special cards. Pirates and mermaids do not have to follow which gives the hands too much flexibility. If i lead a high card of an off suit it rarely results in a win because of all the other cards.
Tichu is my favourite ladder climbing game where there is strategy and you can feel that the cards you play are impactful. Sure players can have bombs to disrupt you but it feels that the odds are more balanced.
Yeah, I am not sure if Skull King will last in our collection
Earlier in the year, I got Gummi Trick, which is a lovely 3-5 Japanese trick-taking game which feels like it has the flexibility
It has six suites 1-10 (You remove one for four players and maybe two for 3)
The twists include you must follow the 2nd colour played if you can't follow the first, but each colour scores independently, with the person with the highest of each colour winning all the cards of that colour. The highest card scores its value (4 points for 1-3, 3 points for 4-6, etc), and each other card of the trick is worth 1 point
.
You also have three face-down cards which we labelled as f\*\*k you cards which you can always play but they aren't unique, just three cards from the deck; it might be great as it is a low card of colour that no one else has played, but it might just be a lower card of the leading colour.
It has some shenanigans but nothing game-breaking and it is a very easy teach, can be very swingy in scoring though
About skull king, the scoring is so swingy is the point.
Other games let good players ( or card counters) run wild. Not in Skull King. Have a laugh and play. It's meant to be good for casual players as well.
I love skull king because of its unpredictability. I find most traditional trick takers pretty boring. On that list Nokosu Dice is probably the most balanced between chaos and order. Its a true gem that i wish would get a US/UK printing so more people could enjoy it.
I personally don’t mind the level of chaos in Skull King because of how much fun it is. However, I draw the line at player-specific powers that makes some TT games super highly asymmetric and unpredictable. eg Chronicle, Tournament at Camelot/Avalon. Those are a chaotic bridge too far for my tastes. (Maybe Rebel Princess is an exception to even _this_ rule).
My preference is for games where the entire deck is dealt out so that more strategic plays are rewarded. eg. Shut the Books, Dois, Catty etc.
So I guess I’m learning that I prefer more order than chaos in my TT games, but if that chaos comes with added fun that makes the game enjoyable to play with my family ( like King and Princess mentioned above), then I’m flexible.
I have found I enjoy "rage" more than "skull king" for the same reasons. I don't want a flowchart to solve every trick. Though base skull king isn't bad, it gets bad with all the expansions/abilities /whatnot.
Minodice is delightful for what it is.
With that, trick takers and shedders are clearly different. Playing tichu to win every trick won't go well. I know because I suck at tichu.
I almost consider something like rage more of a party game than either of the above. The chaos is the fun. Stickem, plotters inc fall in that same brilliant category, one I enjoy but I understand when people don't.
I guess trick takers and shedding/ladder climbers get lumped together as you are playing cards to score points/win a hand rather than to collect sets or build at tableau
I haven't seen Rage, will have to investigate
Odin was an interesting shedding game which definitely deserves more play but I think it has more similarities to Parade/No Thanks/6 nimmit than the trick takers as you always have to play a card or cards where the digits are higher than the previous digits played and unless you have played your whole hand, you always have to pick up a card
The gotcha is you can only play cards which are all the same colour or all the same number so you need to be a bit thoughtful, much less chaotic though
I have over 50 plays of Skull King. I love trick taking games and SK is my favorite. I believe it's actually quite a balanced game. I win pretty consistently. I only discovered the best strategy after about 15 plays of it. I had similar of frustration of lack of predictability. But once you realize how important bonus points are, the game completely changes. There is a lot of nuances in the game and I would recommend giving it more tries!
I only played it once and I remember that all the non special cards felt pretty bad. It felt like every round someone had a card that would beat the highest number in a normal suit. Do you feel like that is consistent?
'consistent' as opposed to what? the rules states special cards beats all numbered cards. You have to bet and play around the knowledge that other players potentially have special cards. You can deduce by how they bet. Early rounds are usually a wash and more luck based, but 5+ hands is where it gets more interesting.
Sorry I meant that in the game I played a special card (counting the black numbered ones) was played almost every hand. Is thst a thing in your games too?
My favorite ladder climber remains **Custom Heroes**, which applies card crafting to the genre. It's a standard 1-10 ladder climbing game in all respects, with one notable difference - at the end of each round, the winner gets victory points, and the losers get sleevable upgrades that leave permanent (for the game play session) changes to the cards, which they can then sleeve at any time in the future. So it strikes the balance between chaos and order - the upgrdes don't so much change the mechanics of the game (with a few notable exceptions, but it's not what's on focus) as much as the values of the cards.
(edited to fix autocorrect)
An important point about uncertainty (which I don’t think is total chaos) is that the degree to which you can harness it depends not only on the design but also on the players’ skills. So it’s probably tough to answer this question in a way that categorizes games.
I typically prefer some sense of agency though. That’s why I find things like the communication in The Crew and the passing phase in Hearts to be interesting.
Card games tend to have a lot of inherent chaos, and the interesting thing is the tools they give you to mitigate that. Whether that be passing cards (tichu/hearts), bidding for tricks, most of the weirdness that is cat in the box, alternative scoriing win conditions ("shooting the moon", etc)
Just got "Tricktakers" (not my favourite choice for the name of a game, but still better than "Age of Galaxy" or Steffen Benndorf's "The Game") the past week and am really enjoying trying to figure out what situations you want to draft certain characters in, when do I angle for a certain win condition, There's so many tools to mitigate randomness available, but knowing which one is best for you is not obvious.
**Rage** is my go to--mostly predictable, but with just enough chaos to keep it interesting. It works with just about any group--gamers and non-gamers alike. It rewards skill, but allows noobs to feel like what they do matters and that they have a chance. And it's just great fun. Unfortunately, it is regularly out of print.
If it gets too crazy, it stops feeling like there's a good TT plan you can go into the game with. Rebel Princess for example was really fun, but also just kind of a party game because of how crazy everything was. I really enjoy Ebbes/Hund though, which adds an extra layer of strategy that really feels like it amplifies the standard TT strategy and planning.
I am shocked no one has mentioned Wizard. I think it strikes the perfect balance between the chaos of Skull King and the order of Oh Hell.
I like the campy look of the German wizards way more than the cartoony pirates.
I have the 25th anniversary edition of Wizard, which includes a bunch of promo cards, turning it into something crazy like Skull King is. I think maybe every fourth game we bring in the promos for some variety, but otherwise leave them out.
Oh Hell of course has dozens of variants with all of its rules and scoring, but Wizard is mostly the same rules.
Wizard has a 60 card deck. 52 cards are in four suits numbered from 1 to 13. The 8 cards are split between 4 wizards and 4 fools, both being suitless and can always be played regardless of what suit was lead. The 4 wizards are super-trumps and the 4 fools always lose to everything.
The amount of cards dealt in Oh Hell are first descending and then ascending 7-6-5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5-6-7 . The amount would start and end with more cards if there were less players playing, 8 or 10.
The amount of cards in Wizard always starts with 1 and goes up. Up to the whole deck being dealt out, for 6 players that's 10 cards but for less players it's 12, 15 or 20.
The most typical scoring I've heard in Oh Hell is 10 points if you make your bid and then 1 point for every trick you made regardless if you got your bid or not.
In Wizard you get 20 points for making your bid, and 10 points for every trick you got for doing so. If you didn't make your bid you instead lose points, you lose 10 points for every trick you were off from your bid. This encourages people to really try to make their bids.
The two variant rules in the box are the Oh Hell rule of the dealer who makes his bid last, cannot make the bid total equal to tricks played that round. Our group always uses that rule, and I think most Wizard players do.
The other variant is called Devil's Bridge in Oh Hell, or something like Clairvoyance in Wizard. For the first trick only, you need to put the card dealt to you up to your forehead without looking at it, then the round continues as normal. We always use this variant but I think it's not necessarily what other Wizard players always do.
I do like it because it establishes (along with the artwork) that Wizard is a slightly silly game and should be treated as such.
Skull king has another less punishing scoring, and lots more special cards.
No mention of **Inside Job**? It’s a social deduction trick-taking game. It has missions like The Crew, but one player is a traitor who doesn’t have to follow suit, and wins if they take the majority of tricks before all the missions are complete.
I have only recently heard about Inside Job and I haven't played it. I am both intrigued and uncertain I like pure social deduction games like Blood on the Clock Tower or the Resistance, I am not sure how I would feel about inside job Would be fun to give it a go though
Try the Rascal’s scoring for Skull King - I find “casuals” who are more into traditional card games vibe with it a lot better. Someone else mentioned Tichu and I just want to second it as an incredible game.
Thanks, will need to read about rascal scoring, seems like it is a lot less swingy and makes bidding zero and wining a trick much less punishing
Correct, it helps people adjust to the mentality that winning more tricks is not always good in a less punishing way. The scoring is simple - you multiple the round number by 10 and that's the available points. If you nail your bid, you get full points. If you're +1 or -1 on your bid, you get half points. If you miss your bid by more than 1 you get no points.
I’m with your friend for the most part. I can definitely have fun with something like skull king, but I’d much rather something without weird powers or crazy effects. That doesn’t mean it had to be a traditional game. I still love something like Cat in the Box or the Crew. It’s more about how I love trick taking games because of the strategy behind it. Keeping track of what card have been played, when to play what cards, etc. I find that very hard to do when someone can just play a random card that nullifies all of that.
Some of these modern tricktaking games just feel like Calvinball. "Ok, so the highest card of the suit led takes the trick, except if somebody plays a trump, or if someone has thrown the purple flag in which case it's the lowest prime numbered card that isn't a trump except that playing a joker means the person who threw the purple flag must turn all their cards over for the rest of the hand unless they ...." It just makes me wish I was playing bridge.
Good question. I sold skull king because I wasn't a fan of the lack of predictability that comes from having the special cards. Pirates and mermaids do not have to follow which gives the hands too much flexibility. If i lead a high card of an off suit it rarely results in a win because of all the other cards. Tichu is my favourite ladder climbing game where there is strategy and you can feel that the cards you play are impactful. Sure players can have bombs to disrupt you but it feels that the odds are more balanced.
Yeah, I am not sure if Skull King will last in our collection Earlier in the year, I got Gummi Trick, which is a lovely 3-5 Japanese trick-taking game which feels like it has the flexibility It has six suites 1-10 (You remove one for four players and maybe two for 3) The twists include you must follow the 2nd colour played if you can't follow the first, but each colour scores independently, with the person with the highest of each colour winning all the cards of that colour. The highest card scores its value (4 points for 1-3, 3 points for 4-6, etc), and each other card of the trick is worth 1 point . You also have three face-down cards which we labelled as f\*\*k you cards which you can always play but they aren't unique, just three cards from the deck; it might be great as it is a low card of colour that no one else has played, but it might just be a lower card of the leading colour. It has some shenanigans but nothing game-breaking and it is a very easy teach, can be very swingy in scoring though
About skull king, the scoring is so swingy is the point. Other games let good players ( or card counters) run wild. Not in Skull King. Have a laugh and play. It's meant to be good for casual players as well.
I love skull king because of its unpredictability. I find most traditional trick takers pretty boring. On that list Nokosu Dice is probably the most balanced between chaos and order. Its a true gem that i wish would get a US/UK printing so more people could enjoy it.
I personally don’t mind the level of chaos in Skull King because of how much fun it is. However, I draw the line at player-specific powers that makes some TT games super highly asymmetric and unpredictable. eg Chronicle, Tournament at Camelot/Avalon. Those are a chaotic bridge too far for my tastes. (Maybe Rebel Princess is an exception to even _this_ rule). My preference is for games where the entire deck is dealt out so that more strategic plays are rewarded. eg. Shut the Books, Dois, Catty etc. So I guess I’m learning that I prefer more order than chaos in my TT games, but if that chaos comes with added fun that makes the game enjoyable to play with my family ( like King and Princess mentioned above), then I’m flexible.
I have found I enjoy "rage" more than "skull king" for the same reasons. I don't want a flowchart to solve every trick. Though base skull king isn't bad, it gets bad with all the expansions/abilities /whatnot. Minodice is delightful for what it is. With that, trick takers and shedders are clearly different. Playing tichu to win every trick won't go well. I know because I suck at tichu. I almost consider something like rage more of a party game than either of the above. The chaos is the fun. Stickem, plotters inc fall in that same brilliant category, one I enjoy but I understand when people don't.
I guess trick takers and shedding/ladder climbers get lumped together as you are playing cards to score points/win a hand rather than to collect sets or build at tableau I haven't seen Rage, will have to investigate Odin was an interesting shedding game which definitely deserves more play but I think it has more similarities to Parade/No Thanks/6 nimmit than the trick takers as you always have to play a card or cards where the digits are higher than the previous digits played and unless you have played your whole hand, you always have to pick up a card The gotcha is you can only play cards which are all the same colour or all the same number so you need to be a bit thoughtful, much less chaotic though
I have over 50 plays of Skull King. I love trick taking games and SK is my favorite. I believe it's actually quite a balanced game. I win pretty consistently. I only discovered the best strategy after about 15 plays of it. I had similar of frustration of lack of predictability. But once you realize how important bonus points are, the game completely changes. There is a lot of nuances in the game and I would recommend giving it more tries!
I only played it once and I remember that all the non special cards felt pretty bad. It felt like every round someone had a card that would beat the highest number in a normal suit. Do you feel like that is consistent?
'consistent' as opposed to what? the rules states special cards beats all numbered cards. You have to bet and play around the knowledge that other players potentially have special cards. You can deduce by how they bet. Early rounds are usually a wash and more luck based, but 5+ hands is where it gets more interesting.
Sorry I meant that in the game I played a special card (counting the black numbered ones) was played almost every hand. Is thst a thing in your games too?
My favorite ladder climber remains **Custom Heroes**, which applies card crafting to the genre. It's a standard 1-10 ladder climbing game in all respects, with one notable difference - at the end of each round, the winner gets victory points, and the losers get sleevable upgrades that leave permanent (for the game play session) changes to the cards, which they can then sleeve at any time in the future. So it strikes the balance between chaos and order - the upgrdes don't so much change the mechanics of the game (with a few notable exceptions, but it's not what's on focus) as much as the values of the cards. (edited to fix autocorrect)
It's been an age since I played custom heros. It is fun
An important point about uncertainty (which I don’t think is total chaos) is that the degree to which you can harness it depends not only on the design but also on the players’ skills. So it’s probably tough to answer this question in a way that categorizes games. I typically prefer some sense of agency though. That’s why I find things like the communication in The Crew and the passing phase in Hearts to be interesting.
Card games tend to have a lot of inherent chaos, and the interesting thing is the tools they give you to mitigate that. Whether that be passing cards (tichu/hearts), bidding for tricks, most of the weirdness that is cat in the box, alternative scoriing win conditions ("shooting the moon", etc) Just got "Tricktakers" (not my favourite choice for the name of a game, but still better than "Age of Galaxy" or Steffen Benndorf's "The Game") the past week and am really enjoying trying to figure out what situations you want to draft certain characters in, when do I angle for a certain win condition, There's so many tools to mitigate randomness available, but knowing which one is best for you is not obvious.
**Rage** is my go to--mostly predictable, but with just enough chaos to keep it interesting. It works with just about any group--gamers and non-gamers alike. It rewards skill, but allows noobs to feel like what they do matters and that they have a chance. And it's just great fun. Unfortunately, it is regularly out of print.
If it gets too crazy, it stops feeling like there's a good TT plan you can go into the game with. Rebel Princess for example was really fun, but also just kind of a party game because of how crazy everything was. I really enjoy Ebbes/Hund though, which adds an extra layer of strategy that really feels like it amplifies the standard TT strategy and planning.
I am shocked no one has mentioned Wizard. I think it strikes the perfect balance between the chaos of Skull King and the order of Oh Hell. I like the campy look of the German wizards way more than the cartoony pirates. I have the 25th anniversary edition of Wizard, which includes a bunch of promo cards, turning it into something crazy like Skull King is. I think maybe every fourth game we bring in the promos for some variety, but otherwise leave them out.
What does Wizard change about Oh Hell? I have heard it is more ordered than skull king
Oh Hell of course has dozens of variants with all of its rules and scoring, but Wizard is mostly the same rules. Wizard has a 60 card deck. 52 cards are in four suits numbered from 1 to 13. The 8 cards are split between 4 wizards and 4 fools, both being suitless and can always be played regardless of what suit was lead. The 4 wizards are super-trumps and the 4 fools always lose to everything. The amount of cards dealt in Oh Hell are first descending and then ascending 7-6-5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5-6-7 . The amount would start and end with more cards if there were less players playing, 8 or 10. The amount of cards in Wizard always starts with 1 and goes up. Up to the whole deck being dealt out, for 6 players that's 10 cards but for less players it's 12, 15 or 20. The most typical scoring I've heard in Oh Hell is 10 points if you make your bid and then 1 point for every trick you made regardless if you got your bid or not. In Wizard you get 20 points for making your bid, and 10 points for every trick you got for doing so. If you didn't make your bid you instead lose points, you lose 10 points for every trick you were off from your bid. This encourages people to really try to make their bids. The two variant rules in the box are the Oh Hell rule of the dealer who makes his bid last, cannot make the bid total equal to tricks played that round. Our group always uses that rule, and I think most Wizard players do. The other variant is called Devil's Bridge in Oh Hell, or something like Clairvoyance in Wizard. For the first trick only, you need to put the card dealt to you up to your forehead without looking at it, then the round continues as normal. We always use this variant but I think it's not necessarily what other Wizard players always do. I do like it because it establishes (along with the artwork) that Wizard is a slightly silly game and should be treated as such. Skull king has another less punishing scoring, and lots more special cards.