TRND
- Board's Eye View
- Sep 11
- 2 min read
TRND is some sort of shorthand for the word Trend. Oink Games are reknowned for putting their games into tiny boxes but the vowel was dropped as a stylistic choice rather than to save on space. In this small-box card game designed by Jun Sasaki, the 3-5 players are vintage furniture dealers trying to put together as large a set as they can of a single style of vintage chair while shedding all other cards from their hand.
The game is played with a deck of 90 cards representing three different designs of chair in three different colours; so there are 10 cards for each of the nine types of chair. Players start off with a hand of 8-10 cards, depending on player count. The draw deck is surrounded with a market display of eight cards, and one card is drawn to seed the discard pile. Turns are super easy: you choose any card from the market display and you discard from your hand one or more of any one type of chair provided it matches either the colour or shape of the card on top of the discard pile.
Players are aiming to end their turn with just a single style and colour of chair in their hand (ie: a single set of matching cards), having shed their hand of all other cards, but players want to end up with as large a single set as possible because their score for the round is the square of the number of cards in their set; so 25 points for a five-card set, 36 points for six cards, 49 points for 7 cards, etc.
If you cannot discard because the card(s) you need to shed don't match either the colour or shape of the card on the top of the discard pile, then you are forced to draw a random (ie: face-down) card from the draw deck, which is statistically unlikely to be helpful, so canny players will try to deduce what cards you are likely to want to shed and may make choices over their own discards in order to make things harder for you...
TRND is a fast easy-to-play family-friendly set collection card game that can be played by children and adults alike in around 20 minutes. The box contains a batch of tokens that can be used to keep score. These have proved to be our one gripe: they have different numbers on each side and it's all too easy for a jogged token to be accidentally flipped. They are also fiddly to fit back in the box, which is only slightly larger than the deck of cards. For us, the tokens were more trouble than they were worth and we've discarded them in favour of old-fashioned pencil & paper scoring. We haven't tho' let the fiddly tokens put us off an enjoyable filler-length game.
