Trickcycle

An idea that I quite like, in a similar spirit to compendium games, is playing a series of three unusual partnership trick games in a row. It's really just another compendium game, but playing 'whole games' rather than just a hand of each. And with no other structure, aside from some kind of score normalisation — just a trilogy of games.

Maybe calling it an 'idea' is a bit of a stretch.

But specifically, I am interested in the invented, but old-ish games Calypso and Quinto. The main common theme between these two is that they each do something slightly unusual with the classic idea of a trump suit. In Calypso this is non-universal — each player having their own personal trump. Quinto is simpler, but effective — the suits exist in a full hierarchy, so that the entire deck is fully ordered, the suits then only constraining the legal cards to play.

What could be a third game that would fit in with these two? I'm sure there are some others out there that would spiritually fit, but I couldn't think of any off the top of my head, and was too lazy in the moment to do any research, so thought I'd see if I could think of any twist on the trump mechanism that might fit spiritually.

Non-transitivity

I quite like the concept of non-transitivity in games. You get all the fun of a hierarchy, with the balance of nothing individual being fully dominant. But introducing this for suits is not immediately trivial for a four-player game.

But here's an idea that might work. I haven't tried it, or even properly thought it through. So, take it with a pinch of salt.

Let's call the suits 'a', 'b', 'c', and 'd' (so I don't have to choose a suit ordering, and then remember it). We order them cyclically upwards 'abcdabcd...'. So 'b' is better than 'a', 'c' better than 'b', 'd' better than 'c', and 'a' better than 'd'. Then the following rules apply (at the end of a trick) for determining which suit is trumps:

• if all cards played are the same suit, there are no trumps (e.g. 'aaaa')
• if the cards are from two sequential suits, the higher is trumps (e.g. 'aabb', 'baaa' both have 'b' as trumps)
• if the cards are from two 'opposite' suits, neither is trumps (e.g. 'acaa')
• if the cards are from three suits, the highest, i.e. the one below only the missing suit, is trumps (e.g. 'acbc' has 'c' trumps, 'adba' has 'b' trumps)
• if all cards are different suits there are no trumps

I like playing later introduces a 'kingmaking' aspect, in that the card played can alter which of the previously played cards wins. Normally in tricks, there is a 'current winner', and playing last means either they win, or you do. This introduces another option, for example if the trick is 'aac', with the leader playing the highest so far, they are currently in line to win the trick. But if you play a card of suit 'b', then 'c' is entrumped and will win. Or you could win by playing a card higher in 'a'. Or the leader could still win, if you play 'c' or 'd'.

However I don't know if this aspect will really work as written. Several scenarios still have no trumps, so I don't know if these kind of situations will come up often enough to be interesting. It would also be nice if there would be even more scenarios possible — for instance if the trick is 'aab', then you effectively have 'b' and 'c' as trumps, but cannot create a situation where one of the 'a's will win.

Another option I haven't really fleshed out is dealing with the nontransitivity sequentially in some fashion. By this I mean instead of resolving the trick as a whole, instead we resolve the first two cards, then the winner of that with the third card, then the winner of that with the final card. This still has the problem of 'incomparables' leaving things a bit flat, like 'a' and 'c'. But like I say, need to think it through.

Where do the cards go?

The other nice thing about both Calypso and Quinto is that they both act as context-dependent point trick games. That is that they are to some degree point trick games (as different cards are not all valued the same), but that these values are not fixed, but depend on how and when tricks are won (in Calypso it depends which side wins the card and whether there is room in their calypsoes; in Quinto it depends whether certain pairs of cards are won in the same trick or not).

So it would be good if this third game also had something along those lines. The whole 'kingmaking' side of things might work well if some cards were undesirable penalty cards (as in Hearts etc.), but unless forced to I think I would prefer to keep this as a pure positive game, like the others.

A loose idea I had was that some cards have different values depending on how they are won (e.g. with trumps, or that sort of thing). But that is really just a vague notion currently. Or maybe only cards of the suit led. Or the card that won the trick. Or cards of the opposite suit to that. I don't know. Many options, and probably won't nail down too much until the trickplay is a bit closer to finalised.

Next

So that's it. Just a rough idea for now, but let's see where it goes.

I don't like that title, but I needed to head this with something. Can worry about that when there is an actual game here.