The Tokyo Game Market has long been a hotbed of innovation, especially where trick-takers are concerned. Sometimes the games don’t work entirely as intended, but, hey, that’s what it takes to transform the world one small iteration at a time. The bricks of the forum weren’t laid in a day.

Case in point: Fractal Tricks, the hybrid trick-taker by Jason Lee, doesn’t always function to specifications. Oh, sometimes it does, and in those moments it’s one of the tightest two-player trickers I’ve seen. But even at its worst, when one participant is rumbling the other — or more often, when both players are still fumbling through the implications of their moves — it’s still an engrossing look at how much remains to be discovered in this eldest of genres.

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