Tricky Kids
- Board's Eye View
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Don't be fooled by the title or the artwork, this isn't a kids' game. The theme of Tricky Kids (Pandasaurus) is that the 2–6 players are primary school children in the playground trading toys but not really knowing their actual value. That's the general idea anyway. In practice, this is a trick-taking card game with three suits of cards (ie: three different colours) but the tricksy part here is that all the cards are blank...
You are dealt nine cards and you choose the seven with which you want to play, and then you use a dry-erase marker to assign a value to each card. You can write the value zero or any positive integer (whole number) but the total of all the numbers you write must sum to 21. There's a row of seven tokens showing the points to be won for each trick, so, for example, the first trick might show that you'd score 1 point for winning a trick with yellow, 2 points for winning with a pink card and 4 points for winning with blue. You play each trick following standard trick-taking card game rules, in that you must follow suit if you can, but with the special rule that ties cancel each other out and so the trick would be won by the next highest card in the lead suit. If there are no other cards in the lead suit, the win goes to the highest card in the next ranking suit using a rock/scissors/paper hierarchy where yellow beats blue beats pink beats yellow.
The rules suggest players take back their cards after each trick and place them face up in front of them so at the end of a round you can all check that nobody has cheated or miscalculated by not summing to exactly 21 (it's nil points for anyone caught out). We can see why this might be necessary but it does add a fiddly element to the game.
There's more. Tho' the rules describe them as being for 'advanced play', the game comes with a deck of 18 'tricky rules' cards. The idea is that you draw one at random and apply it to the seven tricks in the round, and optionally you can play with cumulative 'tricky rules' cards, adding a new card in each of the game's three rounds (hands) so that you end up with three 'tricky rules' in place for the tricks in the final round. Some of the 'tricky rules' effects have more impact than others but we'd always want to play using these 'advanced play' rules.
It's always interesting to come across another novel trick-taking card game, and this game design by Danielle Reynolds and Steven Ungaro has much to commend it. Provided players are all competent with the simple addition demanded by the writing up phase at the start of each round, the idea of playing with initially blank cards opens up some fascinating dynamics. Players can see which suits will deliver the most points for each trick and so that information can help inform your choice over the values to assign to each card. And this is a game where players will always try to psych each other out and second-guess others' choices.
Commendably, Pandasaurus have catered for left-handed as well as right-handed players by facilitating the notation on the cards on either the left or right, so you can play Tricky Kids however you fan your cards. Just beware that the dry-erase markers are designed to easily rub off, so if you fiddle with the cards during play there's a risk of your numbers becoming obscured.
