Links: Thoughts on Trick-Taking, Board Game Manufacturing, and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

I let a lot of things pile up throughout 2021, including links to game-related articles that may or may not still be of interest more than a half year later. Let me dig through the slush pile to see what holds up:

• In December 2021, Chris Wray of Opinionated Gamers wrote about "Trick-taking in 2021: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Future of My Favorite Mechanic", with the title and hook for the article being inspired by Taiki Shinzawa's trick-taking game Ghosts of Christmas. In that title, you play cards to three tricks at a time, but the tricks are resolved only once all the cards have been played, so you won't know who's leading the trick farthest in the future — and therefore which suit is being led — until the previous trick is resolved.

Wray started The Trick-Taking Guild here on BGG in 2018, with members voting on an annual "Golden Trickster" award, and to carry out his predictions of designers doing tiny print-runs similar to what happens at Game Market in Japan, Wray has made his trick-taking word game LetterTricks available on The Game Crafter. Wray also has an area-majority, trick-taking game coming called February in which players attempt to win tricks to schedule events on a calendar.

• Speaking of Taiki Shinzawa, in December 2021 Hilko Drude detailed a few games from this designer in an article (in German) titled "Taiki Shinzawa – der Meister der Stichspiele" (The Master of Trick-Taking). Shinzawa's specialty seems to be putting a wild twist on trick-taking, such as in 2014's Dois in which numbers and suits are on separate cards, with you playing only one card on a turn, thereby leaving the other half of your "card" untouched, and 2019's Zimbabweee Trick, in which your cards stack from one trick to another, giving you larger and larger numbers to compare when determining who wins a trick.

• If you are a board game publisher or are thinking about publishing a design of your own, you might want to check out BoardGameManufacturers.info, a site run by Nations co-designer Rustan Håkansson that invites people to submit comments based on their interaction with manufacturers such as Whatz Games, Panda Game Manufacturing, and LongPack Games, the company with the most positive comments as of this writing.

Håkansson verifies the authenticity of the person submitting the comment, but comments are posted without attribution, other than a simple description of the project, e.g., "2020: 20 000 printed".

• Jon Cox — no, not the one from JonGetsGames — is a clinical psychologist at Brigham Young University (BYU), and he designed the two-player card game Cosmic Battle Training CBT Card Game as a therapy support tool for youth. The cards depict offensive and defensive moves to help a player win the game, and at the bottom of each card is a therapeutic principle from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) that the card represents.

Here's an excerpt from a BYU profile:

Quote:

Cox developed a new card game for youth to help them develop an awareness of their thoughts and emotions while teaching them skills to combat common mental health symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The game, Cosmic Battle Training, is designed to be fun and easy to play.

"The idea is that this game can help youth learn concepts to help them deal with their emotions and their thoughts better," said Cox, who works in BYU's Counseling and Psychological Services. "Ultimately, the game is meant to help improve coping skills and self-resilience in children and teens."

• Designer Wlad Watine won the innoSPIEL 2021 at SPIEL '21 for most innovative game design for Ghost Adventure, a co-operative game for 1-4 players from his own Buzzy Games in which you move along a game board and complete tasks by spinning a top on a board, then manipulating the board to move the top down paths, jump into special locations, and transfer it onto a new board while it's still spinning.

Previous winners of the innoSPIEL award include Root in 2020 and Magic Maze in 2017.

We recorded Watine demonstrating his game during the FIJ game fair in Cannes in 2019 when the design bore the preliminary title "SpinLander":

Links: Thoughts on Trick-Taking, Board Game Manufacturing, and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

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Links: Thoughts on Trick-Taking, Board Game Manufacturing, and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Related

Designer Diary: In the Palm of Your Hand

Gather Your Coven, Duel as Witch and Witch Hunter, and Add Mythological Creatures to Nidavellir

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Game Preview: Cranking Out Cable Cars in Knizia&#039;s San Francisco

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Use Fruit Bats Wisely in Uwe Rosenberg's Atiwa, and Revisit Ohley and Orgler's 1880: China