I remember the first time I was asked to make a contract bid. You don’t forget a trauma like that. I’d played maybe two trick-takers — ever — and suddenly I was being asked a question for which there was no right answer. “Dan,” she said, “Now tell us how many tricks you’ll win.” I stared at her like she was nuts. She was nuts, right? What did she think I was, a precog? The only prediction I could make for my future was that I was about to lose yet another trick-taking game.

My personal journey with trick-takers has been fraught. In part one of this letter to my past self, we discussed the innate simplicity of the genre. In part two, things took a darker turn with triumph suits. Both of those experiences pale in comparison to today’s topic: contract bidding. Or, how trick-takers are secretly the toughest genre of card game in existence.

Reap this. (Reapers)

It’s the tail end of the 16th century. After originating in China and making their way to Europe by way of the Mamluk Empire via spice merchants, parlor and barroom games were sweeping the continent. These paper cards were still undergoing a half-dozen revolutions at once. They had yet to split into two separate genres — the standardized playing deck and the tarot — but had already developed innovations like face cards and triumphs. These “trifles,” from one of the definitions of the Latin triccare, were simple enough that anyone could play them. For some, however, they were still lacking. They hadn’t yet become dangerous.

Or complicated. Nowadays it isn’t uncommon to hear folks bemoaning how unapproachable and obtuse modern board games have become. Those complaints aren’t without merit, but it seems Eurogamers have always preferred to clutter up their playthings. For trick-takers, the great encluttering arrived in the form of l’Hombre. After Italy left its stamp on the hobby by inventing triumph suits, the genre ping-ponged back to Spain, where someone got the bright idea to bid on which suit would become the triumph. This bid took the form of a contract. Everyone either declared how many tricks they would win or made money bids into a shared pot. The highest bidder declared “Yo soy el hombre!” — “I am the man!” — hence the title of the game. In addition to declaring which suit was now the trump, the Hombre also had to defend their contract from the other players. It was an adversarial game, with then-complex rules governing whether the Hombre won the pot, pays an opponent for winning more tricks, adds their bid to an increasing pot for further hands, or earns additional prize money for pulling off stunts like winning every trick.

Over the next century, l’Hombre took Europe by storm, perhaps because of its complexity rather than in spite of it. It was likely imported into the English court through intermarriages with Portugal, dropping its oh-so-exotic pronunciation to become simply Ombre, and whipped up such a moral frenzy that the House of Commons proposed a frivolous act to either ban the game or cap its wagers. Contract bidding soon took other forms, but the basics had been established much as they exist today.

Make ’em smile. (Anansi, courtesy of Rob Cramer)

One of the purest examples of modern-day contract bidding can be found in Anansi. Designed by Cyril Blondel and Jim Dratwa, this game melds two divergent developments in the way contract bidding has developed. The first is the game’s ever-changing trump suit. There are three suits — wasps, snakes, and jaguars — and over the course of play discarded cards are added to their piles. This alters the trump suit on the fly, even within a single hand. But most cards aren’t discarded; they’re claimed with tricks. Discarding a card is a choice, one that awards either one or two followers depending on the card tossed out. These are the game’s bids. At first, followers are drab and gray. It’s only when they’re placed atop a claimed trick that they become “inspired,” flipping to reveal a colorful grin. The goal is to have a matching quantity of claimed tricks and followers. Possessing fewer followers than tricks still earns a few pity points, but having even a single uninspired follower means you score nothing at all. Thus Anansi’s two bidding elements are actually the same system. It’s both exciting and approachable, letting players alter their bid and the trump suit dynamically rather than locking themselves into a bid at the start of each hand.

It’s a good impulse, especially since contract bidding can be the most intimidating thing about the trick-taking genre. “How many tricks are you going to win?” is a heck of a thing to ask a newcomer. Crud, it’s a difficult question for veterans as well, forcing players into a headspace that’s one part prediction and one part ruthless manipulation of the following plays. Advanced strategies become necessary. One is when a player deliberately sloughs, playing a high-value card on the off-suit, to avoid winning too many tricks. Others require carefully watching everybody at the table to figure out ways to force them to miss their declared targets. At least a little bit of card-counting is a must.

Some games strive to ease this process. Daniel Newman’s Reapers asks players to bid on their final trick count, but rather than declaring specific numbers they’re investing in generalities that award bonus points. Scoring the fewest points from tricks is one. Finishing with the second-most tricks is another. And for the faint of heart, there’s the demurring no wager, which awards a pittance but can’t be blocked by rival players.

Of course, not every game’s idea of simplification results in a smooth on-ramp. Tsutomu Dejima’s Trick-Taking in Black and White is possibly the worst game ever designed in the history of the world, and surely not because it hasn’t once yielded me a positive point. This one comes with its bids built in. Every card works to double purposes, belonging both to the black suit and the white suit depending on which way you’re holding it. The goal is to collect tricks in both colors, but only if you can gather an even split. Otherwise, you lose a point for every single trick you collected. It’s a real nail-biter, with each claimed trick escalating the prospect of both gaining and losing more with the final tally. I hate it. I also kinda love it.

The worst game. (Trick-Taking in Black and White, courtesy of Kris Snyder)

Recently, though, my favorite examples of contract bidding are those that ask big questions up-front, while still offering some degree of flexibility. The best examples are two designs by Taiki Shinzawa.

We’ve seen Shinzawa’s work before. Back in the first part of this series, we looked at American Bookshop. It was the one that blended trick-taking with blackjack. By contrast, 9 Lives is almost traditional. Almost. Its central conundrum is that nobody is quite sure how long a hand will take. Instead of displaying claimed tricks via stacks of cards, each trick’s winner moves a cube along a track. They also add a single non-winning card from that trick to their hand. Since the hand only ends once somebody runs out of cards, it’s anyone’s guess exactly how long the round will last.

This is crucial to the game’s bidding system. At the start of each round, everybody lays their player marker on the bids track. The track is a cozy carpet. The markers are cats sprawled thereupon in poses of feline comfort. Bidding is a game of positioning. Not only do cats block their section of the carpet, preventing other cats from claiming the same territory, but they also occupy either one or two spaces. It’s a division between an exceptionally precise bid or something marginally less precise, with the former scoring higher than the latter. Except there’s one more twist. The track wraps around on itself. If a player claims a trick too many, they can try to claim even more tricks, wrapping back to the start of the carpet and landing on their cat once more. It’s a subtly brilliant method for keeping everybody invested despite early fumbles. Since you can potentially double down after a failure, there’s more to the upcoming tricks than baffling your foes.

But even 9 Lives is child’s play compared to Shinzawa’s masterwork. On the surface, Ghosts of Christmas is a Dickensian Christmas story. Scratch a little deeper and it becomes a cerebral struggle to win a time-war. Depending on your preferred difficulty level, cards are played to either three or four eras: past, present, future, and beyond. The first time somebody plays to the corresponding era, you mark that card’s suit on that era’s dial, obligating everybody to try to match that era and suit from now on. In effect, you’re playing three (or four) tricks at the same time, in any order, and trying to command the outcome of them all at once.

Except… Look, the “except” here is already built atop a mind-bending foundation, which gives it the edge of a collapsing time paradox. Basically, those earlier suits dictated what we had to play, but they don’t necessarily dictate which suits will win. For that, we progress from past to present to future and beyond, one at a time. As each era is won, the winner’s next card then becomes the winning suit for the next era. So if I win the first of our tricks, my next card determines the winning suit for the next era. All at once, it encompasses trick-taking, action programming, guessing the future state of the table, information leakage as more cards are played — and it’s totally brain-wrecking.

But we were talking about contract bidding. In a way, that’s Ghosts of Christmas at its least innovative. Basically, it’s a lighter replication of what Shinzawa did with 9 Lives. Everybody chooses how many tricks they’ll win, represented as purple doors (bids) that must be trimmed with wreaths (tricks). Optionally, you can add a red door. Doing so decreases how many points you’ll score for a correct guess, but trimming the red door is optional. Since you’re programming three (or four) tricks at once, you’re given exceptional control over how they progress. But because everybody else is doing the same, that extra bit of wiggle room is much appreciated. The result is a fairly straightforward bidding system bolted onto the front of trick-taking’s most devious method for resolving the tricks themselves. If it had been more complicated, Ghosts of Christmas might have imploded inward like a singularity striking planet Earth. Instead, it’s exactly brain-burny enough to keep everybody on their toes.

Cats! Also wreaths. (9 Lives & Ghosts of Christmas)

As I’ve noted before, the beauty of these games has to be taken together. Learning one of them gives us a head start on learning dozens more. This is the genre’s greatest strength, starting in the shallow end of the pool before easing into greater challenges. If I had started with Ghost of Christmas, I probably would have experienced a cerebral meltdown and written off trick-takers entirely. It was only by proceeding from more introductory designs to denser offerings that I’ve come to recognize how much contract bidding has to offer. This is trick-taking at its cleverest, at its toughest, at its most competitive. It enforces a new way of thinking. Rather than simply chasing tricks, contract bidding forces us out of our hands and into the heads of our fellow players.

And that’s only the beginning. In our next and final installment, we’ll investigate what happens when trick-taking becomes part of something more expansive.

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