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All I play anymore is trick-taking games.
Pies, a remake of Matthias Cramer’s 2015 Plums, does not happen to be a trick-taker. Oh, I’m aware there’s some debate over the matter. Couldn’t this be considered a trick-taking game with but one suit and a slew of ranks? I guess so. That would transmogrify a whole lot of games into trick-takers, but sure. And a hot dog is a sandwich.
Semantic athletics aside, my concern has less to do with trick-taking essentialism and more with this pastry’s sogginess. Cramer has produced some excellent games over the years, from hefty fare like Weimar to more accessible titles like Watergate and The Hunt. Compared to those, Pies doesn’t rate.
Roll-and-Aright
The roll-and-write craze kinda fizzled, huh? Apart from one or two exceptions, the genre never developed much past the bijou phase. Maybe it’s for the best. Even though it hasn’t been all that long since we were playing dozens of the things, Nao Shimamura’s Mind Space carries itself with the air of a throwback. It’s crisp and elegant and even, dare I say it, thematic.
Larger than Life with Just a Hint of Lace
Everything I know about fashion came from either Zoolander or my friend Geoff, so it’s a safe bet to say I don’t know the first thing about fashion. Yasuke Sato’s Couture portrays fashion models as globe-trotting influencers, assembling a portfolio of dresses, poses, and glam squads. As auction games go, it shows glimmers of brilliance behind its workmanlike façade.
Stranger than Documentary
Wordle. If you haven’t played it, you’ve definitely been irritated by its scoring rubrics cluttering up your social media pages. Josh Wardle sold his original game to the New York Times for about a billion dollars, but not before it spawned even more imitators. There was even a board game adaptation. It was garbage.
Peter C. Hayward’s version is not garbage. When last we saw Hayward, he was helping us kill our alternate selves via That Time You Killed Me. Now he’s back with Fiction, a version of Wordle that captures the spirit of the original. Rather than slavishly reproducing the thing, he’s transformed it into a game of panicked guesswork, dueling wordsmiths, and some well-placed lies.
Almoster Famous
I was somewhat cool on Chad DeShon’s On Tour, a roll- and flip-and-write about transiting either the United States or Europe and very likely getting stuck in a corner somewhere. It was a perfectly inoffensive but also perfectly inoffensive game, fifteen minutes long and not one of them too cerebral.
For the system’s second outing, Allplay has handed the reins to guest designer Alban Viard. The basics remain intact. The quality, however, has shot through the roof.
This Is How an Angel Cries
Hameln Cave, designed by Akiyama Koryo and Korzu Yusei, made something of a splash in the wide waters of the Japanese trick-taking market a couple years back. Enough so that it’s getting a remake courtesy of Allplay. Sail this one is called — just try to say it without periodically yelping it aloud, Awolnation style — case in point: (SAIL!) — and like its forebear it’s a two-player cooperative trick-taking game. It’s also quickly become one of my favorite trick-takers. Ever.
