Bark Side
The doggy title is reflected in this game's cute canine cartoon card art from Serene Wyatt but Bark Side is otherwise a simple tricktaking card game from Korea Boardgames played with a deck of cards numbered 1–12 (five of each number). You take out the 11 and 12 cards if you're playing with four players or fewer. In this game the only trick that matters is the last trick of the hand; players are trying to shed high cards in earlier tricks because everyone is trying to avoid winning the final trick. Cards won in that final trick go to the player's tableau and when, after several hands have been played, a player has seven unique cards in their tableau, the game ends and the win goes to the player whose tableau has the lowest total.
Players are dealt a hand of 10 cards and they have some ability to sculpt their hand ahead of the tricktaking because they choose two cards to pass to their neighbouring player.
There are no suits or trumps; players follow suit by playing a card to match or beat the card that's been led, so this is a ladder-climbing game. If you can't or don't want to match or beat what's led, you must play your lowest card. Once a player has discarded their lowest card to a trick, sets of matching cards can be led and must likewise be matched or beaten by similar sized sets. Being unable to follow a set of three cards would mean you'd be forced to play your three lowest cards to the trick. In this way, players are using the earlier tricks to reduce the prospect of them winning the final trick of the hand.
Members of the Board's Eye View team had a sense of deja vu playing Bark Side because, canine theme aside, it is very similar to Friedemann Friese's 2013 card game Five Cucumbers (2F-Spiele/Stronghold Games) which was in turn a reworking of the traditional card game Cucumber (aka Gurka), played with standard playing cards.
A plus for Bark Side is that it avoids the Five Cucumbers issue of potentially early player elimination. Each hand of Bark Side plays quickly but the game can run overly long with four or more players because you could win the final trick on several hands and still not have in your tableau the seven unique numbered cards that end the game. Bark Side can be a light, entertaining card game over maybe three or four rounds but its appeal diminishes if the game goes on for much longer than that. If you think likewise then you can simply houserule that you'll play till the end of four hands.
