This is the continuation of Trick-Taking Week 2025, where I’ll be posting trick-taking related content all week. We here at The Opinionated Gamers love trick-taking games, and as I wrote two years ago, many of the writers in this group have contributed to the growth in the mechanic’s popularity in recent years. 

The showpiece this year is a set of four different top 10 lists, which I assembled by gathering votes from OG writers and various trick-taking designers, publishers, convention hosts, and content creators. 

Today’s list is of ten “beautiful” games of the trick-taking genre. To me, artists and publishers deserve more credit than they often get in this side of the hobby, so I wanted to highlight beautiful productions.  

I posted a greatest hits list on Sunday, and the “hidden gems” list yesterday. The last list — the “most innovative” list — will be published tomorrow. 

The Methodology

For purposes of this project, I simply asked everybody to vote for 10 games that represented “beautiful” games among trick-taking games, assessing art and production value. To be in the running, a game had to be a trick-taking game, and I think it helped if it was specified what edition everybody was voting on.  I did ask voters to put a minimum of gameplay quality on it: I didn’t want this to be a list of games that were strikingly attractive but mechanical clunkers. Anybody could add to the list assuming they were going to vote for it. Each voter was offered the chance to vote for up to 10 games, and they could give one game 15 points, one game 14 points, all the way down to giving one 6 points.  We all put our votes into a spreadsheet. We then added up the points for each game and picked the top 10.  

We had an astonishing 31 people vote, though only 18 submitted votes for the “beautiful” list, and 22 different games received votes on the list.  

To get on the list took a minimum of seven voters rating the game decently well.  That wasn’t a rule, but rather how the breakdown naturally worked out. There’s actually great consensus towards the top of our list.

Below you’ll see designations for gold, silver, and bronze.  Those represent the number of voters that put a given game in the #1, #2, and #3 spots, respectively. 

The Voters

Rather than just having the Opinionated Gamers vote, I also asked trick-taking designers and publishers, plus hosts of trick-taking conventions and other trick-taking content creators. The OG has lots of trick-taking expertise, but the more the merrier. Week-wide, a little over half of the voters are OG members. The second largest category of participants are trick-taking designers: we had more than a dozen of them vote, and the games they made span the genre. The result is a voting pool that has an impressive set of viewpoints on trick-taking. 

I asked certain voters — the designer, publisher, developer, etc. — to not vote for games on which they worked or had an affiliation. They could still vote, but just not for their games. (For example, I did not vote on Yokai Septet, since rules for one of my games is included in the second edition.) 

Without further ado, here are the “most beautiful” of trick-taking games!

HONORABLE MENTIONS (Counting Down)

15. The Bottle Imp (2024 Edition)

14. Tricky Time Crisis

13. The Fox in the Forest

12. Tezuma Master

11. Rebel Princess

TOP TEN

10. LUZ – 82 points, 7 voters*
Gold: 1, Silver: 1, Bronze: 0

9. Nokosu Dice – 85 points, 10 voters
Gold: 0, Silver: 0, Bronze: 0

8. Short Zoot Suit – 87 points, 9 voters
Gold: 1, Silver: 0, Bronze: 1

7. Jekyll vs Hyde – 94 points, 8 voters
Gold: 1, Silver: 2, Bronze: 0

6. Torchlit – 101 points, 11 voters
Gold: 0, Silver: 1, Bronze: 0

5. Cat in the Box Deluxe Edition – 104 points, 9 voters
Gold: 1, Silver: 1, Bronze: 0

4. Yokai Septet – 135 points, 12 voters
Gold: 2, Silver: 1, Bronze: 1

3. Aurum – 142 points, 13 voters
Gold: 1, Silver: 1, Bronze: 2

2. TRICKTAKERS – 151 points, 13 voters
Gold: 0, Silver: 3, Bronze: 3

1. Fellowship of the Ring – 213 points, 17 voters
Gold: 4, Silver: 5, Bronze: 2

*For the reader’s convenience, I will note LUZ is a recently-released (and beautiful) remake of luz. 

Thoughts from Opinionated Gamers and Our Guests:

Chris Wray: Another great list! This was seemingly our list with the most consensus. It does not surprise me that Fellowship topped this list: it is one of the most stunningly-produced trick-taking games I’ve seen. 

The big winner here in terms of artists is the always-amazing Sai Beppu — who I’ve had the joy of working with on two titles — who did the artwork and/or graphic design on three of the games: Short Zoot Suit, Nokosu Dice, and Tricky Time Crisis.

We weren’t allowed to vote on our own games, but if we had been, I would have voted for my self-published game Kansas City, where I think artist Megan Russell did a truly exceptional job. Kansas City did receive votes, but was further down on our list.