It's Tricky

Trick-taking games are generally a rather specific genre of games...

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I stick to the classics, US classics at least, for trick taking games. The Crew being the exception. Spades is my favorite, although since leaving the army it is rare to find local players. Euchre and Hearts would be the follow on favorites and it seems everyone in Michigan plays Euchre, so I am not at a loss for players. My wife and I are famous in our circle for not being able to be compatible Euchre partners. My grandparents and great grandparents were Bridge players, but none wanted to pass along the knowledge. We ended up with Cribbage and Backgammon, good in their own right, but it would have been nice to learn bridge from my grandmother as well.

My dad loves bridge and played competitively for a long time, and every time he's tried to teach me stuff it just slides right off my brain. Something about it doesn't click for me at all.

I play a lot of Hearts and Three-Handed Whist (or Merry Widow as they call it) with my wife and her parents. The no table talk thing took me a while to get used to. I’m still not great at any of them compared to the family that has been playing together for years.

I looked into The Crew as an alternative to Hearts and when I asked my wife if she thought her dad would enjoy it, she said, “Why bother? He knows Hearts really well as he’s been playing it for decades. Plus, he enjoys it. Why change that?” At that point I realized she was right. I was looking for an alternative for me, not him. He likely wouldn’t really enjoy it. But that’s fine.

No Run-DMC video? PASS.

I like trick-taking games quite a bit, although I’m not super great at them.

THE CREW is fantastic although more of a trick-taking game for game nerds than one for traditional card game fans.

There’s a new(?) game on BGA called OH SEVEN that’s in the OH HELL family. I think it’s the best of the family with the exception of WIZARD. You use a standard deck with A-7, and Q of each suit. Qs are zero, everything else is face value. The main twist is that you have to use a card in your hand to bid (it’s revealed and then returned to your hand). So you might be forced to bid higher or lower than you really want, and have to play accordingly.

I could not recommend more that folks intimidated by Bridge, and even folks not intimidated by Bridge but not great at Bridge, play Whist. This USED to be the big trick-taking game in the English-speaking world, and Bridge evolved as a more hardcore, luckless, WAY more complicated version of it. But original Whist teaches you a huge amount of the skills you need to play Bridge, and is a PLENTY deep game on its own, despite being literally the simplest trick-taker I know.

I read the rules for Whist yesterday and it seems to be Euchre with more cards. That was my takeaway.

Used to be a big Euchre, Cribbage and 500 player as a teenager in New Zealand and then as a young adult where it was played during lunch breaks on work sites. Just wiki'd them and interesting to see the history for Euchre and 500, where it used to be very popular and where it is still played - apparently Euchre was regarded as the USA's national card game pre 1900 (take that poker).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euchre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_(card_game)

On one of my worksites they used to play 'Club' Euchre at breaks, Basically you'd have a table of players, more than six was quite common, and playing the normal rules people would decide to be in or out once trumps had been decided. If you stayed in you would score a point for every trick you took or lose 5pts if you failed to take a trick, the winner over the day or days would be first to a specific total. The nub was that if Clubs was turned up it had to be taken and every one had to stay in, or if someone went clubs then everyone had to stay in - a good way to piss workmates off for the rest of the day if you had the opportunity to go clubs with a good hand and send multiple people down .

I don't play any trick-taking games - about a dozen years ago or so we used to play Wizard at one of my groups as a filler, a decent version of 'Oh Shit' or whatever it is called where you live, but few dedicated gaming sessions each week means only the best board or card games get out (and we're lucky to have lived in teh last 20 years with great games).

Americans are raised on EUCHRE, HEARTS and SPADES in my experience, with a smattering of PINOCHLE and KLABBERJASS based on geography.

BRIDGE is for grown-ups.

A popular WHIST variant is OH HELL, where the sum of bids can't equal the round number (ie, someone has to miss). Israelis love this game and refer to it as WHIST.

I've mentioned here before, but my favorite trick-taking game is PITCH (sometimes called SETBACK), where there are only four possible points in a hand (High of trump, Low of trump, Jack of trump, and Game, found by summing card values). Not all points might be out there--you only have six cards. Winner of the bid declares trump, and must lead trump as the first card. Here's the coolest part: you can always trump out of suit. That is, you have to follow suit, as one is almost always bound in trick-taking games; but in PITCH you can always trump out of suit, even if you still have some of the led suit. Makes things really interesting, especially as it comes to winning the Low point.

I used to sometimes play Hearts on my computer during lunch breaks at an old job. When I attended Indiana University, Euchre was a big deal and people often played it at small parties. My vague recollection of Euchre was that a round usually ended early because everybody at the table except me understood that the rest of the round was a foregone conclusion and they all tossed their cards on the table. I thought it was the worst game ever for skipping half the play.

jeb wrote: A popular WHIST variant is OH HELL, where the sum of bids can't equal the round number (ie, someone has to miss). Israelis love this game and refer to it as WHIST.

That's one of the names Oh Shit is called (I was trying to be polite), also 'Up and down the river' while Wizard, as mentioned earlier, was a commercial variant of that.