Fred Serval, one of wargaming’s great rabble-rousers, has a new game out. It might not sound like a new game, since I covered it a year and a halfish ago, but that was a convention freebie that required scissors and some buttons from your bottom drawer to play. A Very Civil Whist is now an actual game you can buy and play and push around, or maybe even press into service as a doorstop if that’s your thing.

I like it even more now than I did the first time.

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Nobody is doing historical board games quite like Fred Serval. That’s a tall claim, considering that only one of his designs, Red Flag Over Paris, has even been released. However, between that and a few secret projects — seeecreeet — Serval has demonstrated a talent for cutting to the heart of a historical topic with straightforward mechanisms.

A Very Civil Whist is currently the best example. Originally designed as a convention gift consisting of only two sheets and a deck of cards, this two-player trick-taker was recently picked up by PHALANX, where it currently sits in the preorder queue.

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