Mit List und Tücke

From: Berliner Spielkarten List Price: $10 Players: 4-6 Playing Time: 30-60 minutes  Type of game: Card Skill level: 7 Complexity: 3  Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 23, April 2000

Used to be that a designer would create a game, and that would be that. No expansions, no modifications, no variations on the same theme. In today’s German market designers are able to wring extra life out of their designs by mixing and matching different concepts and tweaking them here and there for similar yet different experiences. Alan Moon did it with Freight Train and Get the Goods. Reiner Knizia did it with Modern Art and Medici. Now Reinhard Staupe joins the list by putting his card game Hat Trick into the ludic blender to produce Mit List und Tücke.

This deck has four suits, each numbered from 1 to 21. After a player leads a card, other players may follow with any card they wish. The high card of the led suit wins that player’s choice of half the cards in the trick. Whoever played the lowest card of any other suit gets the rest and leads to the next trick.

Collected cards are sorted by color in front of each player. The goal is to collect as many cards as possible in two of the four colors. As soon as a player has a pile of each color in front of him, he must choose which two colors he’s shooting for. At the end of the hand the number of cards in each of his chosen colors are multiplied with each other. That total is divided by the number of cards taken in the other two colors to arrive at the player’s score for the hand. Anyone fortunate enough to take cards in only two colors does not divide at all.

Simple. Elegant. Very nasty.

One of the best aspects of the game is that high cards aren’t the only ones that matter. All cards, even the middle ones, can be useful— the trick is in knowing when. When you’re low man in a trick you’re at the mercy of the high man for the cards you get, so you only want to go low if you don’t care what you take or if you know the high man is interested in different colors than you are. When not in contention for the high or low half of a trick, players want to dump cards in colors the winners don’t want. Not sure who wants what? Spread the colors around. There’s even strategy to be found in choosing which cards to take when you win a trick, both in terms of balancing out your scoring piles (two balanced piles are worth more than one large and one small) and in forcing the low man to suck up colors he doesn’t want.

Though similar to Hat Trick and Sticheln, Mit List und Tücke improves on both. It accommodates 4-6 players equally well (Hat Trick really needs six) and is easy to explain and play (Sticheln’s harder to wrap your head around)— a solid, middle-weight trick-taking game worth your attention.