Varialising Calypso

Erm actually I'm pretty sure it is a word. But if you really have never heard it before, it means 'to make variants of'. Use it today in the groupchat!

The problem with Calypso

I'm a fan of the card game Calypso, as you may have surmised if you have ever seen my Calypso page. I think it's a fun and interesting game to play, and deserves a bit more attention than it currently gets. With that information, then, one may wonder why I am writing a post about varialising (still definitely a real word) Calypso at all?

There are a few (somewhat related) things that are perhaps not ideal about the game, and seem to be turn-offs for some people:

1. It requires four decks of cards, which can be a bit of a faff
2. Distributions can be a bit extreme, which can be quite punishing (e.g. getting zero trumps)
3. You can be out of the Calypso running if all four of a card in your trump suit come out in one deal (and you don't get any of them)
4. The game can be quite luck-heavy (early proponent of the game Ewart Kempson even had this as a selling-point in his book - "Luck plays a stimulating part —and allows beginners to defeat experienced players")
5. A single game plays out over four related hands, and bad luck in the first deal can then severely impact the remaining hands

I personally don't find, on balance, these issues to prove fatal to my enjoyment. Let's look at each in turn:

1. Four decks is a bit of a faff, but not a huge faff. Plus you can play online where this issue is irrelevant
2. Distributions can be a bit rough. That can be part of the fun, but sometimes it really screws you. Things balance out in the long run, but whether or not you have the appetite for the long run is another matter.
3. Again, the multiple cards are part of the interesting part of the game, but it can be annoying when things get so swayed by unlucky deals
4. It is fairly luck-heavy. I think there is enough scope for skill to be interesting, but others may have a different threshold. Certainly quite luck-heavy games can be popular (Whist or Cribbage for example), but perhaps Calypso feels a bit 'heavy-going' and one would expect it to be more strategic
5. The continuation from one hand to the next is again an interesting feature, but can sometimes feel like you are going through formalities if the first couple of hands have pretty well determined the outcome. I personally don't find this happens too often though, and the same can be true of some other games if players get a massive score in one hand.

Altogether, though, I can't help feeling that there is a better version of Calypso lying somewhere beneath the surface. While I do enjoy the game as it stands, I would prefer if it was a bit less luck-dominated, and allowed for a wider range of strategic options (I think compared to some of my other favourite games I less often find myself agonising over which card to play). Of course, finding a version that acheives those aims, whilst retaining the features that are enjoyable, and not introducing other problems is a bit of a challenge.

What is a Calypso variant?

Before diving into some options, it's worth a moment's thought about what it means to be a 'Calypso variant'. Here are some noteable features of Calypso:

1. Each player has a personal trump suit
2. The primary aim is collecting sequences of cards won from tricks
3. There are multiple copies of each card (it is a multi-deck game)
4. It is played in partnerships
5. A game plays out over multiple hands, with the deck being dealt out over the course of these

Others may disagree, but to me the first two are the essential ingredients. I think the first is undeniable - the personal trump suit is quintessentially Calypso. But I also feel like a personal-trump game that was plain trick or straightforward point-trick does not quite 'feel' like Calypso. Such a game may well be excellent, and I may be wrong that it doesn't have the right feel, but for my purpose I am going to insist on keeping this feature, so point 2 is a must. I think probably that having multiple decks is necessary to support the second point - one of the interesting aspects of the game is trying to gift / deny certain cards in tricks, and I'm not convinced the jeopardy of this would work if there was only a single copy of each card.

Some of these features I have worded more generally than needed — mainly this is deliberate, because the more specific versions I plan to violate in variants I will explore below.

The challenges

There are a few unusual features of Calypso which make 'usual' approaches to making a game more skillful slightly more challenging. Some of these are part of what makes the game interesting, so addressing these requires a little care to ensure that something important isn't lost in the process.

One issue is that the game progresses over four hands. How can you have an auction if you are effectively only seeing a quarter of your cards at a time? This, along with the fact there are four decks, also means that there are a lot of unknowns when it comes to other players' hands, which makes reasoning more difficult.

Another challenge is the fact that each player has their own trump suit. This is obviously a key feature of the game, but it potentially poses some problems - in an auction environment it is perfectly possible for everyone to have a 'good hand' (have lots of trumps) at the end. So what is the 'reward' for winning the auction?

There is also the trick-winning rule itself. It has this unusual feature that if you lead your trump suit, the rank you play is entirely irrelevant to whether or not you win the trick. Making the choice of which to play interesting necessitates other constructs of the game (such as saving high cards to trump in, or cashing cards you need for Calypsoes). The trick-play rules are not necessarily an issue, but I occasionally wonder if they need any tweaks to ensure that players have interesting choices to make about which card to play (at least they have such choices relatively frequently).

The variants

I have come up with a few variants to try to address some of these points, at differing stages of development. Some are untested sketches, some are completely vague notions, and others are basically functional. I'm not going to write the rules for each here right now, but here are a few options I have explored:

Continuous play

A simple variant, which I call Embers Calypso is an adjustment to the structure of the game, to allow it to be played to an arbitrary number of semi-related hands. The aim here was to try to temper the more extreme ramifications of unlucky distributions and allow for a bad hand to not completely ruin the game, while still keeping some of rewarding players for denying opponents cards for their Calypso. I also limit the number of cards not in play by reducing the number of decks, to allow possibly for better reasoning about potential opponent holdings.

As well as a game in its own right, I borrows aspects of this as the basis for other variants, as having quasi-independent hands makes it easier to add other structure to the game.

An auction version

An auction is a classic way to add more strategy to a game - you introduce an element of hand-evaluation as a skill, and thus mitigate bad luck (assuming enough hands) by trying to make it so that successful players are those that 'make the most' of occasions when they have a good hand, and deny opponents trying to do the same.

It took quite a while to figure out a way to make auctions work with Calypso. For a time I was trying to make something work with an 'incremental auction', where a bit of bidding happens before each of the four hands. But the semi-independent structure of Embers Calypso allowed me to ditch that idea, and do a more conventional auction game.

One concept I like that come from the idea of for this, is due to the fact that there is 'state' continuing from one hand to the next (i.e. the Calypsos-in-progress). This suggestes the idea of having 'scenarios', a bit like how in duplicate Bridge you play hands at various vulnerability combinations. So you could play a hand with a pre-arranged set of pre-existing Calypso cards in place, and even start games with pre-seeded Calypsoes.

I have a rough draft of the rules which I will write up properly at some point, although these may need subsequent fine-tuning. For reasons I forget the main rules are for three, but I think a four-player partnership version should also work just fine.

Proto-Calypso

Another angle for adding more strategy to the game is creating a choice at the end of each trick — namely what to do with the cards you have won in tricks (as opposed to standard Calypso, where this is automatic). The idea is to not just score Calypsoes, but also allow other scoring combinations to exist, which players can accumulate cards towards.

This game really came about as a 'what if' thought experiment about the original game that R. W. Willis created, which was developed into Calypso by Kenneth Konstam. There is nowhere near enough information on that game to attempt any genuine kind of reconstruction, but it is a fun concept to use as a jumping-off-point for making a variant.

I have a sketch of the rules which at some point I will try to hammer out a bit more solidly.

A louder Calypso

A 'standard' auction is one way to bring 'hand evaluation' into the game. But another approach (which also introduces other objectives into card-play) is to introduce certain 'feats' that can be acheived in card-play, as in Tarot games such as Paskievics, Koenigrufen, as well as Skat and Doppelkopf. These may in some instances be announced in advance, which is where the 'hand evaluation' comes in.

The idea is that these 'feats' are worth bonus points when acheived, in addition to the usual points for Calypsos/won cards. Players are further rewarded (or punished) by committing to undertake these feats ahead of time (and potentially failing to do so).

This one is very much in the 'rough sketch' stage of proceedings, having been neglected for some time, but I hope to dust it off at some stage.

A glorious mixture

The auction version, proto-Calypso, and announcement Calypso, are all somewhat independent changes, and so there are various combinations possible: auction+announcements, auction proto-Calypso, etc. I haven't seriously thought about any of these as yet.

Hand-improvements

Another general avenue that I haven't explored at all, but could prove fruitful, is introducing some element of hand-improvement - i.e. a mechanism to improve your holding.

This could be exchanging cards with partner, or with a talon, potentially as reward for winning the auction. I haven't developed/incorporated this into a variant as yet.

Other efforts

Konstam gave rules for duplicate Calypso in his book, which is a fairly generaly mechanic that can be applied to many games to mitigate the effect of luck. This may or may not work (I have never tried it), but even if it does, it does not solve the issue of games potentially being unsatisfying when you get a bad break. But might well be worth a go - again this treatment could always be tried on any other variants outlined here.

I am not currently aware of other variants that are attempts to 'improve' Calypso - all others I know are for other numbers of players (or the cutthroat four-player game, which seems to be 'because we can'). If you know of any others please do let me know, and I'd be happy to include rules on the Calypso page/ direct a link elsewhere as you please.

What next?

Hopefully writing this out while spur me on to actually write up rules that I have so far in the versions that are sufficiently developed. There are also a couple of other variants I have which have different design goals (and so I have not included here), but I will also write up soon (for some value of 'soon').

Find all my Calypso variants (as well as those created by other people) in the variants section of my Calypso page.