The very first card games, going back to the earliest Chinese decks, were trick-taking games. And these stayed popular across centuries and countries—and across different decks. In America, the dominance of Whist and Bridge in the 18thand 19th centuries gave way to Hearts, Spades, and Pinochle in the 20th century. And last year, according to our board game and card game survey, 18% of Americans played Spades, 11% played Hearts, 7% Bridge, 5% Euchre, 4% King, 2% Pitch, and 1% played Rook. In fact, trick taking was the largest category of card games in the list of top games. (On a personal note, the most popular of all the games I’ve ever designed is a trick-taking game: Diamonds.*)

But trick-taking games hadn’t traditionally been popular among tabletop hobbyists, with one exception: Wizard. In fact, the very first boardgame convention I regularly attended had a Wizard tournament every year. Wizard uses a conventional 52-card deck plus 4 Wizards and 4 Jesters.

Jon Simontov mentioned to me that when he first pitched Vamp on the Batwalk “that was before the recent trick-taking renaissance, so publishers weren’t very interested.” But there has in fact been a renaissance. Of the top 10 trick-taking games (card or board games), seven of the ten date from 2019 on (in contrast, for example, auction/bidding has only one of its top ten from 2019 on). And graphic designer Daniel Solis attended this year’s Tokyo Game Market and notes that “The current hot trend is trick-taking games, and I knew there would be a LOT of games in that genre for sale.”

In 2019, The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine rocketed to the top of the charts for trick-taking games thanks to two main innovations—

  • First, it is a cooperative game. The table wins a hand if all players complete their tasks (if any, as this depends on the number of players and the specifics of each mission). A task involves capturing a certain card (suit and number) in a trick, sometimes in a certain order. Tasks are dealt face-up.
  • Second, The Crew has a series of missions, with different numbers of tasks assigned and with different rules.

The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game, by Bryan Bornmueller, expands on each of these innovations. Missions are now chapters and have different characters, drawn from the corresponding chapter of the book. Each of the 18 chapters has different characters, and the characters have different tasks or win conditions (e.g., Frodo must win the Rings suit, Pippin must win the fewest tricks, Bill the Pony must win exactly one trick, lol). Every player will have a character (unlike in The Crew, where players might not have tasks).

Three cards from FOTR-TTG-Chapter-1

Some chapters add other aspects. Like Old Man Willow is a 9 of Forests card that gets added to a Forests deck just for that chapter (it can beat any other card but the One Ring), and the automaton plays a card from the Forest deck at random and can win a trick, regardless of suit, if it has the highest number. The chapter about Weathertop adds negatives from the Black Riders to the main characters. And so forth.

Some chapters you just need to win with a few highlighted characters. Others you need to play multiple hands until every character has triumphed.

While The Crew has been criticized as being very abstract and lightly thematic, The Fellowship—while still abstract—is much more thematic, bringing as it does people’s understanding of the book or movie into the game, with excerpts from each book chapter as flavor text for each chapter.

By a wide margin, BGG users say the game works best with four players (86% of the 170 voters). I completed a campaign with two players (the least popular player count), where you play a third character whose cards are arranged in a pyramid with alternating rows of face up / face down cards. This may make it easier than a three- or four-player game, due to the high level of coordination this enables. Between players, communications about what is in your hand are quite restricted.

Two of us played the entire campaign in six sessions, playing about two hours each time, except for the final session. We’d lost the final chapter three times in a row, called it quits for the night, then won it easily in less than a half hour. After a campaign, you can reorder the cards to play another campaign. But we’ll probably wait for The Two Towers, coming out January 16.

What I love about Fellowship is that because it is a trick-taking game, I can get more people to play it than some of the more complex card games I also like. It’s also great for new parents, who can squeeze in a hand or two before the baby wakes up.

See also:

*But the popularity of my game called Diamonds may be from people confusing it with Mike Fitzgerald’s Diamonds. Oops.

Photo credit: Asmodee.