This is a nice way of bringing some strategy to the trick-taking, since you have a chance to take out your opponent’s highest card. 11 – “Monarch” – Not only is 11 the highest card, when you lead it the opponent has to either play the 1 or the highest card they have of that suit.The powers of the odd-numbered cards are as follows:

But there are 13 tricks every round and someone has to win them, so plan accordingly… Game is to 21 points, so going from 6 points to none is a big deal. But in an interesting twist, winning too many is actually bad! Here are the trick bonus points: There are 13 tricks each round, and points are awarded at the end according to how many tricks you win.They’re not necessarily game-changers, but they add enough variety to the mix to make it much more interesting than “I win, you win, I win, you win…” The odd-numbered cards have special abilities that activate whenever you play them.It’s a good balance because now a few cards are out of play so you’re still guessing, but it’s not so many that you can’t ever try to plan. Each player gets dealt 13, leaving 7 in the middle with one of the middle cards being flipped up to determine the trump suit. It uses a special deck, only 3 suits with 11 cards each for a total of 33 cards.So what does TFITF do to try to overcome these challenges?

The artwork is really cool, if you’re into that sort of thing in your games With 3 or 4 players you can clean out a suit much more easily, making it easier to formulate a plan when you play.

Simplified trick taking – With only one other player, whenever you lead a trick you only suck out one other card.

Not a lot of variety in play – Because you’re stripping out cards you often have to strip out other elements at the same time from games, like bidding or melding, making it a very rudimentary game, where all you’re trying to do is take tricks.

If there are more players they have a better chance of keeping someone from running the table but if it’s 1 on 1 and you don’t have any good cards there’s not much to be done about it.

Very static games – If one player has a much better hand there isn’t a lot the other player can do.

The problem with that approach is now 1/3 of the cards are out of play, which makes strategic planning difficult or impossible. The usual way to mitigate this is to deal an extra “dummy” hand so that if a player doesn’t have a card he doesn’t know if it’s in the dummy or in his opponent’s hand.

Knowing the location of the cards – Clearly if you deal all the cards out to the 2 players everyone knows where every card is.

They present a specific set of problems that TFITF sets out to overcome.įirst let’s talk about some of the challenges a 2-player trick taking game presents: If you’ve played and enjoyed trick-taking games like pinochle, spades, hearts, bridge, etc., you know that 2-player versions of those types of games are rarely any fun. The Fox in the Forest is a card game that tries to be something that’s always been very elusive: a good, interesting 2-player trick-taking game.

The fox in the forest card game witch