So I didn’t attend TGM but I did manage to acquire a few games. TGM designers continue to astound me with clever designs for trick takers and shedders as well as capturing unusual themes. Here are some of the stand outs for me:

Sumidagawa Red Town, by Mashilamaru and published by Sunny Bird, is a reimplementation of a grail game, Sumida River, for those that don’t follow the TGM card game scene. You play as rival gangsters moving into your opponents territories shedding your hand of cards along the way. The first to go out wins. What makes it different from your casual shedders is that after hands are dealt, you are allowed to pass your cards to another player also interested in passing hands but you add a hitman or wild card to your hand before passing and this can be repeated as long as you have hitmen and a willing opponent.

In addition, players may play melds to one of 8 locations. Each location requires a specific meld like a pair or a run. To play, you must play a higher meld to an open location, where one of the cards played must equal or be higher than the previous meld’s highest card.This edition also comes with a nice 2 player variant. Red Town lived up to the hype.

Keeping with the gangster theme is The Four Deuces, from Geonil. The Four Deuces is the next in Geonil’s fantastic series of 2 player trick takers. You play as Al Capone or Bugs Moran. Like previous designs, Jekyll vs Hyde and The Yellow House, Geonil makes use of changing suit strength. Here the 4 suits have no ranks. Players roll 7 dice each at the beginning of the round. The first player leads a suit and assigns one of their 7 dice as the rank. It’s a must follow. If cards of the same quit are played the higher card wins. If different color suits are played, the higher ranked suit advances up the strength chart and the suit determines the winner of the trick. Each player’s hand is divided with players playing the first 4 cards and then the last 3 cards. The goal is to win exactly 4 tricks. Each of the protagonists have a special power which may be used once. Al can force a swap of cards and Bugs allows a swap of dice. This is a really interesting 2 player game giving you open information about each player’s ranks and limited knowledge of the suits. Managing the suit strength is a neat challenge.  It may be my favorite from this designer.

Mate is the pup themed trick taker I’ve been waiting for. It’s a standard must follow trick taker. The Stay Go cards which are numbered like the deck. Are shuffled separately and one is flipped over each hand. The number will be trump for the hand. Then if it is a stay card the winner of the trick will receive negative points and if it is a go card positive points can be earned by the players with the winning number and the second place player. So nothing too “tricky” here but we had fun and I enjoyed the cute little dogs on the cards.

Many Stories Mansion from Jupiters Club was high on my want list. It is a mash up of tetris like games and shedding games. It utilizes fixed hand order so your melds must come from adjacent cards. Cards that you have played then form your mansion and the cards are moved down in the order played tetris style onto your building. If you are the first to shed your hand you get a bonus roof card for your mansion. Your goal is to make shapes of adjacent cards of the same suit which complete missions and to try and have many floors in your mansion as well. Your score is equal to the number of completed missions x the number of floors in your mansion minus the number of leftover cards in hand. Love the innovation here and glad it met my expectations.

For something a little different, consider giving Cats’ Secret Night Tales in the Museum a try. Designer Asami Yamanaka has done a solo game travel series but has only recently started to have works in English as well as Japanese. I’d love to see an English version of her manga game Van Gogh and Theo. This is a solo RPG where you play as Bastet, the cat goddess, and work your way through the museum to fight the big baddie at the end. The big baddie has stolen the color from the museum’s paintings! Along the way you must gather paint and mix colors to restore color to the paintings. Help is available from the other cats in famous paintings in the museum.. Game play is easy but it’s a cute little story and you might learn about some works of art along the way.