If you’ve ever played Bridge, Hearts, Spades, or Euchre, you’ve played a trick-taking game. Trick-taking is the easier to define of the two, as versions of this game have populated our leisure time since we were kids. There has been an absolute boom in games that rely on the primary mechanic of “trick-taking,” or the adjacent mechanic of “ladder-climbing.” If you’re interested in why that may be, there’s an excellent article by Chris Wray that digs into that question over at The Opinionated Gamers which will explain the phenomenon better than I could.īefore we continue, let’s define a few terms. As mentioned (and perhaps coined?) in my recent review of Thrones of Valeria, we are in the midst of a magnificent Trickaissance.