by tofarley
I like trick-taking games.Wait, no. That's a lie. I kind of like them.
Well, sort of. I like the idea of trick taking games.
My wife likes them though. Loves them is probably more accurate. I suppose that's probably on-par for most of the non-gaming world. Everyone has played Bridge, Hearts, Spades, or even Euchre at some point in their life, right?
I guess what gets me about trick-taking games are the partnerships. I'm not good at them. I don't really mind losing, but I hate dragging my teammate down with me. Surely there's a trick taking game out there that's fun, light, and has just the right amount of chaos to ensure that even my sucky butt has a chance at winning a round once in a while?
Enter Chronicle. A trick-taking game from Seiji Kanai, the now-famous designer who brought us the unexpected hit filler-game of Essen Fair 2012, Love Letter.
Chronicle was originally published in 2009 by Japon Brand and later delivered to America by Z-Man Games. Chronicle is a trick-taking game with no partnerships (huzzah!). Each round one (or more) cards are revealed that determine the goal for the current hand. These range from "take the fewest blue tricks" to "take the most green tricks" with stops along the way at zaniness like, "play with both of the previous rules" (the suits have cute thematic names, but that's really not relevant).
The game is short -- like perfect length short. Each player who achieves the goal for a given hand earns themselves a "Fame Point". The game comes with some nice cardboard chits for this; no pencil or paper scorekeeping required. The first player to earn 3 Fame Points wins. If there is a tie, you can opt to play until a clear leader emerges, or all the winners can share the victory and split a hot fudge sundae on the way home or something.
There are 36 cards in the deck: 10 cards in each of 3 suits numbered 1 through 10, plus 6 wild cards. Wild cards aren't a trump suit or anything like that -- though there are two of them that essentially say "you win the trick". Wild cards are just... wild. They can be played at any time.
Oh, and there are 4 evil cards: 1 in each of the 3 suits, plus one wild. If you're caught with any of the evil cards at the end of a hand you are completely excluded from consideration for points. Just pick up your cards and pretend you weren't even there... Unless of course the current rule in play says that you earn Fame Points for having evils at the end of the round. That's a different story entirely. And of course you can always "shoot the moon", and have all 4 evil cards in your possession at the end of the hand. Then you get 2 Fame Points. Easy peasy.
So how does Chronicle play? Well, it's a trick-taking game... Deal out all the cards, and then one player leads a card and the other players must follow suit if they can (or play a Wild card). If they can't follow suit, and cannot or choose not to play a Wild card, then they discard a card of another suit face down into the trick. High card wins the trick.
Sweet. That's it. Those are the rules... except that this is a Seiji Kanai game, so every card has a special ability that is activated when the card is played into the trick. These special abilities are what set Chronicle apart from virtually every other trick-taking game I've ever played -- and make it a truly amazing game. The abilities range from allowing you to select cards out of a trick that was already won by an opponent and put them into your own won tricks (or into your hand), force opponents to pick up cards already played this trick, add a card to your won tricks from your own hand, reverse the order so that low-cards win the trick, etc etc. Chaotic? Yes! In a totally awesome way. The chaos doesn't completely derail the game into a wasteland of futility. Like any trick-taking game you can think about what's been played and what's still out there. The "3" of every suit makes the low card win. The "1" is the evil. Has the "3" been played? Will I have to take this trick? I have the green 10, but someone's got the Wild King, who wins the trick regardless. Has he been played? When tricks are won, even the face-down off-suit cards are turned face up and splayed out for all to see, so it becomes really obvious what cards are still waiting to be played. You can't blame your poor short-term memory when someone plays the blue "7" and forces you pick up your blue "10".
Photo uploaded by Y Kim
This game is awesome. Throwing off-suit cards face down doesn't activate their powers, and it allows players to ditch those nasty evil cards without you knowing they're in there. You were all set to win this trick, but I've gone and thrown an off suit card face-down. Did I just sandbag you with an evil? Probably
. You'll find out when someone wins the trick and flips the card over.I could go on about this game all day. Seiji's gotten a lot of attention this year with AEG's release of Love Letter, which is indeed a fun and clever game. But Chronicle is Seiji's crowning achievement in game design thus far. It is his Tigris & Euphrates. It's the game by which I will now judge all of his future designs.
I played Chronicle with my game group a few weeks ago (before BGG.CON and before I owned two copies of Love Letter -- AEG and Japon Brand editions), immediately after the game ended one of the players picked up a copy from our FLGS, and two more were seen scouring the shelves trying to find it later in the same evening. Moreover, they were not only caught up in the one-night hype, but the other two people waited for the FLGS to restock and bought the game the following week.
Will I still rave about Chronicle next year, or the year after? I don't know. Right now I'd say it's the probably best $10 I've spent on this hobby. It's all the chaos I'd expect from a Bruno Faidutti game... oh wait, in 2011 Bruno Faidutti released Dwarf King -- which sounds pretty much like the same exact game. I'm not saying Bruno was influenced by Chronicle, or that he even knew of his existence, but Bruno's been posting over on the Love Letter page, so he definitely knows who Seiji Kanai is now -- and Bruno's a legend. I'm sure he put his own spin on things. I'll probably try Dwarf King at some point. Who knows, it might be even better!