Mix paints to win tricks.
Designer: Jeffrey D. Allers
Artist: Heiko Günther, Anja Heidenreich
Publisher: Cambridge Games Factory
In the trick-taking card game Pala, players are art students who are learning to mix their pigments on the palette to get the right color for their canvases. The cards are the paint colors, and the palette is the table. By playing cards together (that is, mixing colors), you can effectively change the color of your cards as well as the trick itself.
The published version of Pala includes two ways to play. Both variants use the same mechanisms for playing tricks, but have different bidding and score rules. Thus, once you wrap your head around the basics of the game, you can play two wildly different games with those core rules.