Dear Rob and Jason.

I’ve been a long-time listener, and I enjoy listening to your journey. I’ve recently moved to NYC and joined the NYC playtest group, and gotten deeper into designing games, so hearing your prospectives is cool, and a good thing to put on while I assemble my own prototypes. . .

I don’t usually yell at my TV (or, in this case, computer) but in listening to Jason pitch “war stories” this (last) week, I did. I think that Jason’s design sounds like it could be fun, but it is not a trick-taking game. In the jargon of card games, trick-taking refers to a specific mechanism where someone leads a card, everyone else plays a card, and the highest play wins the “trick.” Despite what you may have heard, Tichu and Clubs are not trick-taking games; Ted Alspach’s You Suck is pushing it. This, is why, Jason, I was audibly interjecting “That is not a trick-taking game” when listening to that episode—and Jason, I’m going to stop you– or at least call you out.

For comparison, you wouldn’t call Village a worker-placement game. Even though placing workers out on the board is a central part of the game, because the way they function is so different from the archetypical worker-placement mechanism that calling it a worker-placement game would confuse anyone you’re trying to explain the game to.

“War stories” sounds like an interesting bluffing game, but you’ll have to try again to design an actual trick-taking game that you’ll like.