Our stable of writers at Opinionated Gamers includes a bunch of talented game designers. So to give them a chance to expose some of their creations to the world, we’ve started a new feature called “Designer’s Corner”. The first entry is WYSIWYG, a card game from Larry Levy. Enjoy!
Introduction
Let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine to the year 2000. Gaming was very different back then. The Geek had just been launched. The hot new game was Tikal. And there were practically no commercial 2-player trick-taking games to be found. In fact, there were very few new trick-takers of any kind—there just wasn’t that much interest in them from most players.
That’s the world I was living in during one quiet Sunday, in which I was passing the time by thumbing through my well-worn copy of Hoyle’s Rules of Card Games. (In those early days of the Internet, such an activity was more common than you’d think—at least for me.) I came across a trick-taker designed for 2 called German Whist. The game’s main feature was that, prior to each trick, the top card of the deck was revealed. The winner of the trick replenished their hand with that card, while the loser drew from the deck. This immediately struck me as a missed opportunity. I mean, that second card could be anything: maybe crap, but maybe a considerably better card than the winner got to take. That didn’t seem fair. Wouldn’t it be much better, I thought, if the top two cards of the deck were revealed? Then the players would know what the stakes were prior to each trick and the winner would take the card of their choice, leaving the other card for the loser.
This was such an obvious concept that I spent the next 20 minutes ruffling through the book, until I confirmed that no such game existed (at least, not according to Hoyle). “Well,” I thought, “I guess I’ll just have to design that game myself!”
Tricks and Trumps #2: Variations on the Classics (1967-1990)
Tricks and Trumps #2: Variations on the Classics (1967-1990)
This is our second entry in a thirteen-part series featuring trick taking games. You can find the first entry here and the series introduction here. This entry will focus on trick taking games from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, which tended to closely resemble the classic, public-domain trick taking games. Games included in this entry are Sextet, Coup d’etat, Ninety Nine, Black Spy, Wizard, and Where’s Bob’s Hat?.
As we explained in our first entry, we put an enormous number of trick taking games into a ratings spreadsheet, giving each Opinionated Gamer the chance to offer their rating. We decided to write about any game that was (a) rated by more than five people, and (b) had an “average” rating at least as high as the midpoint between our “like it” and “neutral” rating. I’ve also added a few games that are historically significant. The games are ranged roughly by the year of origin.
This post concludes trick-taking week here at The Opinionated Gamers, but this Tricks & Trumps series will continue, with the remaining eleven parts being published over the course of the rest of this year.
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