All I play anymore is trick-takers. And while some of them are challenging, others risk disappearing down their own pipe-hole in a semantic puff of tobacco smoke.

That isn’t a bad thing. This Is Not a Game About a Pipe, designed by Mac McAnally, may have started as a riff on René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, but it’s a respectable little ditty in its own right, in no small part thanks to the way it forces players to construct studiously sensical statements about their cards.

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