A solitaire trick-taking game sounds like a contradiction in terms. Then again, I used to say the same about two-player trick-taking, until a few superb examples showed me the error of my thinking.

It’s still too early to tell whether For Northwood!, the solitaire trick-taker by Wil Su, is an outlier or an originator, but it makes for a dang good time either way. More than that, it functions as a primer for a handful of trick-taking concepts that can prove intimidating to tackle in a multiplayer environment.

Comparing my hand to the available challenges.

Back when I started This Trick-Taking Life, my series on falling in love with the world’s oldest card genre, I noted a common complaint that newcomers to tricks tend to vocalize: isn’t this whole thing entirely random? To be sure, there’s plenty of chance at play. Many modern trick-takers tinker with the foundations of the genre as a means to escape the capriciousness of the draw, although these efforts rarely mitigate the issue altogether. And why should they? Riding high on a good draw is part of the fun. Even better is the triumph of bending a poor hand to your will.

Su pulls a deft one with For Northwood! Rather than erasing — or even easing — the possibility of a bum hand, the entire game is structured around it. A full session consists of eight hands. The particulars of these hands are prepared from the get-go. Right away, you can see both how many tricks you’ll be expected to win and which suit is trump. You also have some helpers, animal companions whose special abilities can tweak the rules in your favor.

And then you draw.

With the benefit of foreknowledge, you now select which of those eight challenges to face. If you’re holding a bunch of cards in the paw suit, maybe it’s a good time to tackle the challenge that requires six tricks — a daunting number — but with paws as the trump. Or, since you aren’t holding any flowers, maybe it’s a good time to play the flower-trump challenge that requires you win no tricks at all. In both cases, the composition of your hand is precious foreknowledge. It’s sort of like heading into a session with limited precognitive abilities. You know the gist of how each future round will play out, so you match your current hand to each one to maximize the odds of success.

Over multiple hands, your options diminish.

Of course, this wouldn’t be much of a game if it were as easy as I’ve made it sound. Winning or losing a hand marks it as solved and prevents you from choosing it in the future. Over time, the available selection narrows. Where early hands give you a winner’s buffer of options, later picks force you to get creative.

Fortunately, the capriciousness of the draw doesn’t overwhelm the possibility of success. Not too often, anyway. I mentioned your animal pals. Whenever you win a hand, the corresponding animal is now available for future plays. There are some strict limitations. You can only take three animals into a hand, and unlike your starting companions these unlocked animals are single-use only. But with some clever planning, it’s possible to avert disaster. In one recent session, it was my final draw of the game — and I drew six trumps when I could only win one trick. No trouble: a well-timed ability let me discard all of one suit. Now I was not only holding zero trumps, but the entire hand would only last two tricks.

Except I still lost. I hadn’t quite thought the hand through. In retrospect, the answer was obvious: I should have won a single trick with my ample trumps, and only then used my ability to dump the rest. For Northwood! revels in that sort of play, where a single misplaced step could rumble an otherwise sure thing.

That’s a big part of its charm. Su has designed a game that takes all of ten or twenty minutes to play while still hitting the high notes of the genre. It even functions as a learning tool, covering advanced mechanisms and strategies. Contract bidding is often the most intimidating aspect of trick-taking for newcomers, but here it’s handled almost effortlessly as you match your hand to the right challenge. It also shows how you can exert control over your hand, usually by shedding when you could win or being choosy about which cards you play when you lose. Play this thing five or six times and you’ll slip into the light card counting that dominates the genre. And if we want to get more metaphysical about it, For Northwood! even demonstrates how trick-taking is thrilling precisely because of its chaotic nature. It’s a game that shows you that it’s okay to lose because of a bad draw. Because that will happen. A lot.

Working with animals.

I’m still suspicious of trick-taking as a solitaire endeavor, but not because For Northwood! doesn’t work. If anything, it works so well, so comprehensively, that it must be daunting to consider designing in the same space. Everything about it has the feel of a masterwork, from the wide diversity of animal abilities to the plastic cards that can be endlessly shuffled without wearing down — a must, given how often this thing gets shuffled. Su has created something truly fine.

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