YORKTON - When it comes to card games, trick-taking might lead in terms of most games with it as the core mechanic.
There are a huge number of games where you play out cards in hopes of capturing tricks – or some version of the idea at least, and that popularity suggests card players like the mechanic – a lot.
But when you sit down for some solitaire fun the mechanic doesn’t always work very well. While there are ways to play ‘versus’ some mechanical process woven into the game, but such randomness doesn’t work particularly well when the idea is to follow suit to a trick – generally how trick-takers work.
For Northwood! a print and play game reviewed in this summer series previously was a pleasant surprise, offering a solo trick-taking experience which was excellent.
If Northwood worked it made sense other solo trick-takers could as well.
That brings us to this week’s PnP game; ECK: A solo trick-taking card game created in 2020 by John Burton.
Burton is becoming a designer I follow a bit because he creates some rather fine games – for example The Blackred Curse: A trick-avoiding card game for two players.
This one uses a very nice-looking specialized deck where the ranks are polygon shapes where increased complexity means increased trick value: line, triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, octagon.
The suits are colours red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.
So there are six ranks and six suits.
There are also six circle cards, three white and three black, which act as trump cards, which are a nice twist in-game.
So as you might have guessed ECK is a solo trick-taking game where the you play against the ‘AI opponent’ or in-game forced play.
In this one you are attempting to collect trick cards by winning exactly the number of tricks shown on the available trick cards.
There are seven trick cards numbered 2,4,6,8,10,12, and 13/0. The player's goal is, at the end of each round, to win exactly the number of tricks shown on one of the available trick cards, collecting that card if successful. Collecting four trick cards wins the game.
The player starts with a hand of 13 cards and plays one card to each trick. You then play a card from the remaining deck on behalf of the AI based on the rules for following suit. This mechanic is a bit forced here, you can go through several cards to get one that plays for the AI, but ultimately it works well enough.
And, there are ways for ECK to win also.
ECK is not Northwood good, but with the neat custom deck to print and play, it has enough going for it to recommend if you like trick-taking games.
