3 players.
Play time: 15 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A copy of Trick’n Trouble was provided for review.
Welcome to spooky season, friends! This is the last set of reviews in October, so it seems fitting to cover a few games that have spooky themes. They aren’t the only spooky games I’ll be covering this year, but they’re definitely on brand for this particular day. I’m always excited about Halloween, even though I kind of prefer Christmas as a holiday. You gotta give some credit to your witchy friends for the season, though, and we all love skeletons. To that end, let’s cover Trick n’ Trouble, by Fukutarou!
In Trick n’ Trouble, you’ve encountered the scientist Doc Crazy! He wants to summon something nightmarish and terrible, and only you can stop him! Unfortunately, you have to get a bunch of items to do so and you can’t let the good doctor know that you’re onto his schemes! Can you collect the various items and take the wind out of his sails? And most of all, can you do it without talking?
Contents
Setup
Setup isn’t too complicated. First up, shuffle the task cards in their various piles:
Flip three Level 1 cards, one Level 2 card, and one Level 3 card. Shuffle the playing cards next, dealing five to each player. Leave the remainder as a draw pile:
Give each player a summary card and then choose a player to start. You should be ready to go!
Gameplay
Over nine rounds, you’ll try to play and win tricks in order to acquire valuable items to shut down the doctor’s schemes! But be careful, winning tricks isn’t nearly as hard as winning the whole game!
Each round, you’ll start by filling up the tasks. If there are fewer than five, the start player may draw from any of the three piles to fill up the tasks. Then, each player draws back to five cards in hand, provided there are cards in the draw pile. After doing that, each player can pass a card to the player on their left, starting with the start player. That player looks at the card they received and chooses whether or not they want to pass it (or a different card) on to the next player. Then, if the start player dislikes any of the tasks, they can return it to the bottom of its deck and replace it with any other task.
Now, the trick-taking starts! The start player leads with a card and then every player must follow suit by playing a card of the same color (cards with multiple colors are fine). If someone leads with a 1, all players can play any card that they want.
After the trick ends, count up the total values of each color and see if they meet or exceed any of the tasks! If they do, take the task card as points and start a new round! You can collect multiple tasks in one round. After nine rounds, if you’ve earned at least 40 points, you win! If you get good and you consistently beat 40, try Expert Mode! To do that, put tricks away without looking at them again and skip the phase where you can swap out tasks before the trick starts! Good luck!
Player Count Differences
This one’s three-player only, so, none here.
Strategy
- You pretty much need to be getting like, five points per round if you want any shot of winning. 40 points is a lot! You do kind of need to keep that in mind, so try to keep making constant progress and dump useless tasks as you progress.
- Try to get tasks lined up so that you can complete multiple per round! Synergy is pretty key to success here; you only have so many cards of a color, after all.
- Keep track of what cards other players are playing and what cards have already been played. Try to figure out what’s in their hands and also, unless you’re playing Expert Mode, you should track which cards have already been played. After all, you need to know what tasks are still achievable and just burn tasks that you can’t get anymore.
- You really don’t want to waste too many useful cards. Once they’re gone they’re gone. Try not to aggressively overshoot tasks, for instance; you might be able to save the higher-value cards for later and play lower ones but still meet the task. Lots of cards will come up over the course of the round.
- There’s some wisdom to playing the card you were passed, but keep an eye on the task cards to inform that decision. Your coplayer may be trying to get rid of a color and not necessarily giving you a card to play, or they might be giving you a high card to get rid of all the cards of a color that they have, so that you can play that and they can play another card in their hand to fulfill a task. Keep an eye on those tasks! Generally, it helps to assume your coplayers are trying to play optimally.
- Depending on the tasks, it may be more helpful to try and get rid of a color. Sometimes being able to throw off a certain color might mean that you can get all three colors represented, which can help with certain high-difficulty tasks, which is great.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Love a spooky theme. I just think it’s almost always a fun theme for a game! It also sets the games nicely in the “why don’t we play this for Halloween” space.
- The trick-taking is interesting. It’s a bit more of a puzzle game than a trick-taking game, to some degree, though the way you solve the puzzle is trick-taking. It’s very interesting.
- I really like the dual-color cards. I love when trick-taking games play with suit and format in ways that make things more interesting. Plus, they count for both colors for tasks, which I really like! Just be careful since they also count for being forced to follow suit with them.
- I do like trick-taking games where you don’t get your whole hand at once. It makes players think on their feet and makes it hard to know exactly what cards the other players have in hand, which can be an interesting challenge, to some degree.
- Plays pretty fast. Most trick-taking games do, but this is really just one hand of cards, so that helps a lot.
Mehs
- Small decks of big cards aren’t terribly ideal for shuffling. You just can’t riffle shuffle these as well as some of the other decks of cards I’ve used in the past.
- I do wish there were a difficulty curve of some kind, rather than just one number to beat. Technically there’s a range of scoring options, but most of them are some flavor of “you lose” until you hit 40 points. It would be nice to still be able to “win” with fewer points up front.
- This is just me being an annoying American, but I wish the items were in English so I knew what they actually … were. I’m just lazy and never learned other languages. I understand that this is mostly on me.
- Doc Crazy is kind of a boring name for a supervillain. It’s just very … on the nose, you know?
Cons
- If you’re not prepared to count cards pretty explicitly as part of a trick-taking game, this one might not be for you. Card-counting and tracking what your coplayers play and don’t play is a pretty big part of the game, so if you’re not into that, this might be a tough one.
Overall: 7 / 10
Overall, I like Trick n’ Trouble! It’s definitely a tough game, not going to pull any punches on that front, but I think fans of trick-taking as a genre will appreciate its difficulty and complexity compared to something a bit more introductory like The Crew. Personally, I wish it had the same level of complexity ramping as The Crew does, but, at that point, it starts feeling a bit similar. Games should be their own thing, and that’s fair. I do love the theme, though: spooky season is upon us and it’s a great time to break out literally every Halloween-themed game under the sun. I don’t love “Doc Crazy”, but that’s because it feels like a lazy name for a bad guy. There are a few other things I don’t personally love, but they’re largely nitpicks. The real challenge here is that I don’t think I would recommend this to be someone’s first cooperative trick-taking game. The game benefits from having players with a fairly solid amount of trick-taking game experience, and you’re not going to necessarily learn the tricks you need to know from playing in the same way that you might in The Crew or Sail or something. That doesn’t make the game bad by any stretch, but it does make me caution folks who are interested to cut their teeth on other games first and then they might have more success. If you’re ready for a tough trick-taking game, you want to get a bit spooky, or you just like cooperative play, though, I’d recommend Trick n’ Trouble. It’s a fun and neat game.
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