Pippinside Scoop

My initial half-draft of this makes reference to Old Twelvey and the Wassail, which gives a reasonable idea how long it's taken me to get this finished off.

It waffled on about all sorts of apple and cider-related guff, so you can probably count yourself lucky that I didn't get it finished anywhere near in time, and so you are left with this straightforward by-the-books intro.

This blog post is a quick design overview of my loosely apple-themed card game Pippins Aplenty. If that doesn't interest you, then tough luck. You've read this far, so you should just knuckle down and push on through. You're not a quitter, are you??

Setup

When I saw the announcement for the BoardGameGeek-based 2025 Traditional Deck Game Design Contest I thought it would be a great thing to enter. I'd heard of it before, but only loosely, so it wasn't really on my radar. But unfortunately, I didn't really have any games ready to publish that were suitable and not already published. I know how I usually am with this kind of thing, so I decided to take the pressure off — let's have a think about ideas, and if one looks good let's give it a go, but otherwise don't force it, and be more prepared next year.

I looked through my pile of undeveloped ideas - maybe around twenty. Some of these are barely an idea — the kind of thing you scribble in the middle of the night and can't decipher the next day. Some don't really have a clear direction; ideas I've realised have been done already, with nothing else to push it in a new direction. Some I think are still interesting, and are just waiting for the right moment to be developed. But none of them I felt particularly excited about at that moment. And I knew with a 'small' time window (only three months!) and limited free time/energy that if I didn't feel excited about a project I'd never get it into a fit-enough state to share. I toyed with a couple that are slightly more developed, but I just knew that it wasn't the right time for them. So I dropped it.

Every now and again, in the course of day-to-day life, I'd think about card games, and ponder ideas, but with no particular aim or force. Just little musings, as I often do from time to time. There are common themes to these, which vary over time, such as:

• Mechanisms around hidden partnerships
• 'Doing stuff' with the cards you win from tricks
• Context-dependent point-trick games
• Permanent 'state' that persists from hand to hand

But also there was another thought, related to a game I'd designed earlier in the year: Scalade.

A mechanism

Scalade is a game I designed, was pretty happy with, and left alone whilst I moved onto other things. I came back to it some while later to try and code up a playable version, and in so doing accidentally created a variant, which I eventually fell in love with and promoted to the 'main' rules. All of this is a story for another time — I only bring it up because, as I played more of it, there was this one aspect in particular that really felt fun, and seemed to me like it was 'bigger' than just the particular mechanism in that game. Something that was more general.

In Scalade there is a variable trump suit, which can change from trick to trick. This is set by a 'global state' - the communal ladders, with the lowest-ranked ladder setting the trump suit. These ladders are in turn are affected by the cards played to each trick, as any card played which is sequentially above a current ladder card then takes its place.

In particular what I like about this is the slightly indirect nature of it - often to try and set a suit up as trumps you have to play tricks of the other suits to 'push up' their ladders, leaving your desired suit as the lowest. At other times you have to play your desired trump suit itself to push the ladder 'over the top', often sacrificing holding the ladder in the process as someone else captures your 4. But either way, a portion of each hand tends to be trying to influence the trump suit to set yourself up for the latter part of the hand where you can cash in on this (and hoping you haven't left it too late, so that there is not value to be gained!).

A question I kept pondering was: Is there a different mechanism that captures some of that same feeling. That is to say, a variable trump suit, that is controlled in a similar somewhat indirect way; a side-effect of cards that are played (as opposed to things like marriages where you directly set a trump suit with the play of certain cards). I felt sure there should be such a mechanism - indeed probably many! But I could never come up with anything.

Then one day (15th or 16th of October according to my notes, for those keeping score at home), while doing some of this pondering, a thought came to me — the second-highest card (irrespective of suit) played to each trick sets the trump suit for the next, the idea being that as soon as you needn't follow suit, you can potentially set yourself a trump suit, but to do so you need to use up a card of the suit, and probably a high-ish one.

Even when coming up with this I knew it probably wouldn't quite work as-is - with the trump suit bouncing around each and every trick you can't really 'set up' trumps, so it probably would probably all feel a bit consequential / random. Nevertheless, it felt like somewhere vaguely around this area might prove interesting, if I fiddled about for long enough.

The following day I came up with a thought that hit upon an idea that on the surface is somewhat different, but followed directly from this train of thought, and had something of a similar flavour. From my notes: "Maybe actually it's like a Bottle Imp kind of thing. So trump starts at 0. Then the lowest card above the current trump card (if any) change trump suit So it will probably change a few times early, but get less and less likely.".

To put this perhaps slightly more clearly: What if there is a public card that sets the trump suit, and each trick, the lowest card played that is above this trump-setting card becomes the new trump card, setting a new trump suit with it. This rank would then rise over the course of the hand, before being fixed in the end on an Ace or King (probably). Immediately this felt like exactly the kind of mechanism I was looking for, and I excitedly started trying to put it into some kind of reasonable shape, under the horrible working title 'Supremum' (I realise many of you may not like my actual title any better, but I do, and the other half agrees, so tough luck to you).

Developing the Thought

As ever, as soon as a mechanism emerges, I was hit with the immediate trouble of also trying to consider an objective. A simple plain trick game? Point trick? Exact bidding? The possibility space at this stage I always find daunting, and it's not always obvious to understand how these decisions will interact with the core mechanism.

But one thing I had to guide me here: I wanted to incentivise setting up your trump suit, as that was part of the driving motiviation for the whole concept. I didn't want it to be a pure 'last trick' kind of game, but I wanted to make sure players would need to spend at least a bit of energy trying to fight for a trump suit in the earlier part of a hand. Even if I couldn't use this to guide me on a route forwards, it would hopefully at least help me rule out some options I might consider so that the number of avenues to explore could be more manageable.

The other principle (which is far too grand a word, but roughly captures the sentiment) I tried to hang onto was based on my 'success' with Scalade (the success being only as far as I'm concerned - I'm very happy with that game, even if I have not necessarily managed to convince others!). The thing I feel I did with that game (mostly) that I usually fail to do (or sometimes willfully choose not to do) is to really keep the design focussed on a single thing. There is a core mechanism, and everything else is in service to that, without a bunch of extra flavour / spice / alternate modules.

Others may disagree, but I feel that I largely succeeded with that in Scalade, and I found it hugely satisfying as a result, and allowed the game to be finished much sooner than if it had been more baroque. So I wanted a goal that was, more or less, the simplest I could think of that still serves the core mechanism.

As I often do at this earlyish point in the process, I then just grabbed a pack of cards, tried out some basic version by myself, and took some notes on what was good or bad. I played through a deal of four players, playing cut-throat, with all cards dealt out for 13-card hands. I had this mechanism in place, and whist-like follow rules (my default, as it tends to work so well), but with no concrete scoring, rather than a vague notion of wanting to 'win tricks', which was good enough for now. I had three main thoughts from this game, all of which ended up being part of the finished game:

• In the early part of the hand the trump suit changed a fair bit, but the battle for it seemed a bit pointless, as it didn't really matter too much until it got settled later in the hand. Perhaps, to give a slight sense of 'memory' to these early tricks, we could have not just a single trump suit, but a trump hierarchy, as in the game Quinto.
• Maybe we could use the trump-setting card to set a threshold for how valuable cards won are, depending on whether they are above / below this. This could mean that tricks 'organically' tend to get more valuable as the hand goes on, which means that you'll usually want to set up trumps nicely.
• If we're basing the game around trump suits, it probably won't work too well if everyone has a pretty flat hand, so perhaps we need some way of ensuring that hands are potentially a bit more distributional, such as a card exchange of some kind.

I immediately wrote down a new set of rules from this. It had a full trump hierarchy, and ties of trump-setting cards being broken by a suit preference hierarchy, and a scoring schedule where cards above the top trump-setting-card were worth less than cards below, with more powerful trump cards worth more. By the time I came to try it 11 days later I'd revised further, to make it a partnership game (as this kind of shifting card-point idea felt like it would come into its own with some smearing possibilities), and I'd revised scoring so that the higher trump cards were least valuable, with no score for cards above the threshold (to give a bit of dilemma with setting a trump suit making the cards less valuable, as well as winning early tricks being less valuable).

The main take-home from this playthrough was that speed with which the trump suit was set. It was actually a leisurely 9 tricks, but at that time it felt too quick. I tried out other versions where you only had to tie with the previous top card, rather than overtake, but this was rather uninteresting, as holding back an Ace always gave you the option to overtake the trump suit. I also got rid of the suit preference, settling instead for a simpler order-of-cards-played tiebreaker - I do love suit asymmetries, but it felt like it didn't quite fit in this game, where positional play did.

The scoring worked, and I grew happy with the pace of trump-setting. The final puzzle was twofold: how to get interesting distributions, and how to allow a small amount of partnership communication. Going straight to playing cards meant it was just a little too blunt to be able to get any idea of what your partner was after, until long after it was too late to do anything about it. I tried lots of different ideas here, and ended up with the final answer of 'simultaneous open discard'. This allows each player to just nudge to slightly more distributional hands, and then having these displayed opens the door for a small amount of clueing to partner, and felt about the right level. I also had many ideas for what to do with these cards (maybe the winner of the final trick gets them, or the final four tricks get one each, etc.), but ultimately I decided (following my earlier 'principle') that I didn't need to do anything with them, so they simply stayed out of the game.

By this point (end of Novemeber) I was happy enough with it to share publically, and so entered it in the contest. I anticipated further amendments, but probably not huge ones, depending on what feedback brought. Unfortunately from this point, things got busier which meant I was unable to give the time to fulfil the contest entry criteria, but I was happy that I'd at least managed to get things into a fit enough state. One valuable suggestion I received (many thanks to Vincent Bugica) was the idea of ditching the point-per-trick I had previously had, which upon reflexion I agreed with. That score was really a vestige from earlier drafts, and wasn't adding anything useful, so was fat that should rightly be trimmed.

But beyond that, I have become increasingly happy with the game. I'm now pretty happy it is in a 'final' state, as much as anything ever is. There may of course be future amendments, which may be part of the game itself, or spin off into variants. But I think that it is a good game, and acheives what I wanted. It has some of that similar Scalade feel (in terms of the mechanism), but feels quite different. There are interesting decisions to be made, and it is often quite frustrating (in a good way). It's ended up with a different feel to what I expected, but in a pleasant way.

I have played enough now, I think, to have a bit of a grasp of the basic strategy, so intend on writing that up, as I think that can often help newcomers to find a path in. I'm sure it will not take people long to realise which bits of advice are worth adhering to, and upon which I am completely mistaken.

Epilogue: The Name of the Game

" What's the name of the game? Does it mean anything to you? "

Names are tricky. This is a known fact.

They are also very taste-dependent, and I'm aware that names that appeal to me may not be the most 'broad appeal' names. There's also far less constraint with names than with working out the details of the game. In some sense it is inconsequential - the game will still be as good, or bad, regardless of the name. Of course, in practise, the name probably has a big effect on whether it appeals enough for anyone to even bother giving things a look. But it's probably better to not overthink it, and just get something to call it, and before long it will just be sounds. Maybe.

But when trying to come up with a name for this game, I wanted a name that had some connexion to the game, even if it was fairly oblique. And something relatively distinguishing probably helps.

I also thought, with the game being designed for a wider contest, that it might be good to give it a theme of some sort, even if added after-the-fact. As often with these things I was in a Sussexy mood, and eventually settled on the notion of apples, and a fight over an apple tree. I sketched out a version of the rules with this apple theme, but as this was an 'optional extra', I first focussed on a plain version of the rules, with this promised apple-themed version yet to come. It is still on my list to write this up, if only as an exercise.

You can get a bit of a window into my process by taking a look at the new rejected game names page, to see what else was in the running (and others that probably never really were).

In the end I settled with 'Pippins Aplenty', and felt fairly happy with the choice. I hope that you will so fall in love with the game that the notion of 'what the name means' becomes just a curiosity, and rather than some (probably fairly tenuous) theme, simply conjures up the your association with the spirit of the game itself.