Tricky Seasons: Finland
- Selwyn Ward
- 16 minutes ago
- 3 min read
I've always had a soft spot for the notion of board games as souvenirs. When on holiday I like to pick up a board game from the locale, tho' timing hasn't always worked in my favour. My trip to Lisbon preceded the publication of Vital Lacerda's Lisboa (Eagle-Gryphon) by just a few weeks so I had to settle for an alternative game with a Portuguese setting (Caravelas from MesaBoardgames). On a visit to St Petersburg, I walked the entire length of Nevsky Prospekt to reach the Hobby World shop in pursuit of a copy of Saint Petersburg (Hans im Gluck/Z-Man Games) only to find it was out of print. For my souvenir game I had to settle instead for a Cyrillic edition of Russian Railroads (Hans im Gluck/Z-Man Games). Days of Wonder have been edging into the souvenir market with their various city-themed editions of Ticket to Ride but their trains haven't yet arrived at Helsinki. Queen Games have a growing line up of city-themed titles that include Helsinki but, if you're looking for a travel-friendly souvenir of Finland, Dragon Dawn Productions have managed to combine in Tricky Seasons a suite of attractive photos of the Finnish countryside with a characteristically tricksy trick-taking board game.
Designed by Ren Multamaki, Tricky Seasons: Finland is a game for 3-5 players that combines trick-taking with bidding and tic-tac-toe-style area control. Tho' it's very much card driven, we'd be reluctant to classify it as a card game because there are dice (albeit used primarily as markers rather than random number generators) and a board. Players are assigned a number (1-5) and you'll get to place a marker die out on the 4 x 4 board when you win a trick, or in some circumstances when you come second, with the colour of the die corresponding to the season which was the suit of the lead card. Markers of the same colour score for rows and columns but players begin each hand by selecting two cards from their hand as their prediction of the number of points they will score from the rows and columns.
The four suits correspond to the four seasons, and the trump suit for each trick is always the season that follows that of the lead card; so if you lead with a spring card it's the summer cards that will be that trick's trump. What makes Tricky Seasons especially interesting is that it's a game based on mostly open information. All the cards are in play (you fillet the deck from 60 to 48 cards if you play with four players rather than five, and you add a dummy hand if you have just three players). You have sight of the opening randomised position of the board and players all 'bid' their predicted number of points using two of the 12 cards in their hand. That means you know which 8-10 cards are out of play... This is a game that calls for cunning hand management and clever manipulation of the markers on the board, especially as you can find yourself placing out markers that give points to an opponent; so you need to take extra care that you're not helping them to fulfil their prediction for the hand...
Tho' Tricky Seasons is notionally a 3-5 player game, the fill-in player for the three-player game is very much a dummy rather than an automata - the cards from their hand are played randomly - so we much prefer this as a four- or five-player game. The game is played to a set number of points and, so far, most of our plays at Board's Eye View have run to three or four rounds, and we're all enjoying the view of all those pastoral scenes of Finland's across the seasons.
(Review by Selwyn Ward)
