At this point, there are a lot of trick taking games in the world. It’s kind of comforting to pick up a new one, and already know most of the rules. “This is a trick taking game, but here’s the twist…” and then bam, you’re off to the races. Maybe you’re trying to avoid taking the prince suit in Rebel Princess, or there’s a whole flowchart of special characters that beat one another in Skull King. Either way, trick taking games can be counted on to be taught extremely quickly, which means you’ll go from opening the rulebook to actually playing the game in mere moments.
That familiarity is part of the genre’s appeal. Trick-taking games feel communal in a way few other mechanisms do. Everyone comes to the table with a shared vocabulary: follow suit, trump, void, lead. Because of that, designers can afford to get weird. They can bend expectations, twist assumptions, and trust that players will roll with it rather than get lost in the weeds. When a trick-taking game introduces a new hook, it often lands immediately because the foundation is already there.
Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition, designed by Muneyuki Yokouchi and published by Bezier Games, is a trick-taking game where none of the cards have a suit until they’re “observed,” or played. Every card is black and white, so players must declare the card’s suit when it’s played. That single idea alone feels clever, but the real trick is that there are five of each card value in the deck, but only four suits in the game. So you really need to hope that no one is going to play the red 4 when you were counting on your 4 to be red, as that might just force you into a nasty paradox.
That tension between possibility and inevitability is where Cat in the Box really lives. At the start of a hand, everything feels wide open. Your cards could be anything, heck, they are everything. But as suits get claimed and the shared board fills up, the future begins to harden in uncomfortable ways. What felt like flexibility suddenly becomes constraint. You’re not just playing your hand anymore, you’re trying to weave in-between your opponents cards, trying to sneak in one last play before the proverbial door slams shut.
A paradox occurs when none of the cards in a player’s hand can legally be played. Thankfully there’s a dual layer board that you put your own coloured token onto whoever you play, a card that tracks all the cards that have been played so far. Also, having tokens connect on that board are what earn you points at the end of a round. I find the board that tracks the cards that have been played to be the most helpful thing. Granted, this would be a very difficult game to play without it, but as someone who struggles to remember which cards have already been played, I really appreciate its existence, to the point where I wish every trick taking game I play would have one.
And that board is not just functional, but it actively shapes how you think and visualize the game. Instead of relying entirely on memory, you’re constantly scanning the board, reading the patterns, and watching where other players are committing themselves. The board turns the abstract concept of “what numbers and suits are left” into a tangible and spatial arena. You can see the risk accumulating, sometimes literally clustering on one half of the board.
The concept of declaring your suit is one that’s tough to wrap your brain around in theory, but once you have the cards in your hand, and you start playing, it’s surprisingly natural. The trick really comes in knowing when to call yourself void in a suit to play the red trump suit, and how to maintain your own strategic tempo going forward. Sometimes a gambit pays off, sometimes the other colours fill up much faster than you were expecting, and before you know it, the only cards you have left have to be blue, and you told everyone you were out of blue 3 turns ago.
Those moments are equal parts satisfying and horrifying. When a plan comes together, it feels brilliant. When it collapses, it’s usually because of a decision you made much earlier, when the consequences weren’t yet obvious. Cat in the Box is very good at making you feel responsible for your own downfall. In other games I’d blame the bad hand of cards I was dealt, but here, I have no one to blame but myself.
Players earn points in 2 ways. Firstly, you earn one point per trick that you’ve won. Easy, straightforward. Unless you caused the paradox, then it’s -1 point for every trick you won. Whoops! The other way to earn points is via token adjacency on the main board. At the start of each round, after looking at your cards, you need to bid on the number of tricks you think you’re going to win. If you’re successful in your bid, you earn one point for every token in the largest group of adjacently connected tokens. Earning that you get to score those bonus points from token adjacency scoring is a huge benefit, and properly maximizing those points can easily swing the game on its own. What I like here is how the bidding doesn’t feel bolted on. It integrates naturally with the spatial puzzle on the board and gives players a clear incentive to take risks.
Making your bid and scoring your adjacent tokens can be a real boon, but it can be really tricky to accomplish, as the round ends immediately when someone triggers the paradox. This can be supremely frustrating for the other players too. If you managed to collect your tokens all together, but someone causes a paradox one turn before you’re able to win the last trick needed to satisfy your bid. It creates an exciting moment of tension. Speaking of tension, each hand has a really great arc, as cards get played, the options available to you quickly diminish. When everyone is holding only two or three cards left, it feels like a standoff. Whose going to be the one to fail, is the person who goes right before you going to take the last 3 spot?
Cat in the Box is a fantastic subversion of the trick taking mechanism that gets players excited. It’s novel, interesting, and strategic, which each play leaving you thinking about how you could have done better. The production by Bezier games is no slouch either. The dual layered board keeps all the tokens in the right spots, the player tokens themselves are brightly coloured, translucent, and screen printed to showcase a different science-y thing, which just makes this production extra charming.
The novel subversion of the trick taking mechanism is the most interesting part of Cat in the Box, which means players who don’t have a lot of experience with trick taking games won’t appreciate the whimsy the game is presenting. It’s for this reason that I wouldn’t recommend breaking it out amongst trick taking newbies. But for the groups that have a few different trick taking games under their belts, then Cat in the Box is a delightfully fun surprise.
Let me start by saying that I adore the theme of Rebel Princess.
Classic fairy-tale princesses have generally always been trapped in a fairly grim narrative box. No matter how brave, clever, or capable they are, their ultimate “win condition” tends to be the same: get married. Roll credits. Rebel Princess turns that expectation on its head. In this game, the princesses have decided they’re done with proposals, done with princes, and absolutely not interested in settling down just because the story says they should.
What makes this theming so interesting is that it’s not just a coat of paint. The theme of Rebel Princess is built around rejecting marriage, and that idea feeds directly into the trick-taking gameplay in a way that feels intuitive. I absolutely love it when a theme informs gameplay.
Rebel Princess is a trick-taking game inspired by Hearts. If you’ve played Hearts, you’ll already understand most of the game, which is to avoid taking certain cards, because those cards will give you points. And points are bad. In Rebel Princess, those points take the form of proposals. Each prince card represents a proposal, and the goal of the game is very simple: avoid proposals at all costs.
The deck is divided into four suits, numbered one through ten. One of those suits is the Prince suit, and that’s where the trouble lies. Each prince offers exactly one proposal to the player who takes the trick containing that card. Take a prince, take a proposal. The player with the least proposals wins the game. Also, just for a bit of an added twist, the green 8 is the Frog Prince, who is worth 5 proposals when he’s won.
So far, so familiar. But Rebel Princess is so much more than a straight retheme of Hearts. It layers on a couple of systems that dramatically reshape how the game feels.
The first and most important addition is player powers. Each player takes a princess tile at the start of the game. Each of these princesses are classic literature (or if you’re a millennial like me, from the Disney movies of our childhoods). Cinderella, Pocahontas, Mulan, and many more. Each princess comes with a unique ability that modifies how you can play the game. Some let you break suit rules, some let you manipulate tricks after they’re played, and others invert the hierarchy of numbers for a specific hand.
These powers do a fantastic job of pushing Rebel Princess beyond a purely reactive trick-taking experience. You’re no longer just counting cards and tracking suits, you’re actively planning around when to use your power, who it might hurt, and how it will interact with the rest of the table. I had one game where I successfully baited out the prince of frogs, only to swap the card I played for a much lower one, sticking that player with a nasty 5 proposals. Bam, gottem.
That being said, this is also where one of my small hesitations lives. The princess powers don’t all feel equally impactful. In my plays, some princesses use their abilities maybe once or twice per game, saving them for some dramatic moments. Potentially, other princesses can forget what your power is, because you’ve gone 3 rounds without using it. Others seem to fire almost every single round. That imbalance doesn’t break the game, but it’s noticeable, especially once players become familiar with the full roster. I suspect experienced groups will gravitate toward certain princesses more than others.
The second major addition to Rebel Princess are the round cards.
At the start of each round, a round card introduces a new rule that changes how the entire hand will play out. Often this begins with a card-passing phase: pass one to three cards to your left or right. Already, that small change can dramatically reshape your hand and your plans.
Then comes the twist. Maybe this round if you manage to take no tricks at all, you immediately take five proposals. Now you HAVE to win at least one, right? Another round card could be something like, every three card you capture this round is worth negative three proposals, suddenly turning low cards into high-value targets. These rules force you to re-evaluate what “good” play even looks like from round to round.
Together, the princess powers and round cards make Rebel Princess far more dynamic than a standard trick-taking game. You probably won’t fall into a single dominant strategy. What worked last round might be actively dangerous in the next. That constant change is what makes the game feel fresh even after repeated plays.
If you’ve played a lot of classic trick-taking games, Rebel Princess turns so many of the genre’s stables on it’s head. High cards are dangerous. Winning tricks is often bad. Suddenly, you’ll find yourself desperately trying slough off your highest cards and clinging to low numbers so you can dodge those pesky suitors entirely.
There are few feelings in trick-taking more satisfying than surprising your opponents. Those moments when someone thinks they’re going to get away scott-free, only for you to stick them with 3 princes, or even better, when you suddenly play off-suit and drop that 5 proposal frog prince right into someone’s lap.
The most dramatic moment of all though, is shooting the moon.
If you manage to take every single prince and the Frog Prince, you flip the script entirely and score negative ten proposals. Pulling this off feels incredible. And the tension, as you take prince after prince, the table growing the realization that you just might pull it off, and they’re powerless to stop you…
It’s one of those moments that players will remember long after the game ends.
I’ve never played the original Hearts, but I have played a lot of trick-taking games over the years, and Rebel Princess comfortably sits among the better modern entries in the genre.
The production helps, too. The card art is charming and expressive. While every card doesn’t have unique art, each suit has its own full-card illustration, which is lovely enough. The princesses tiles themselves are full of that rogueish personality that gives the game it’s name.
With a large roster of 12 princesses and 26 round cards, Rebel Princess has a lot of variability baked in. Mixing that with the natural replayability of trick taking games, you’ll be exploring new combinations of powers and rules often.
In the end, Rebel Princess is a smart, satisfying twist on a classic formula. It’s approachable for players familiar with Hearts, but deep enough to reward repeated plays. It manages to be playful, mean, thematic, and tactical all at once. That’s not an easy balance to strike.
I give Rebel Princess a full recommendation. If you enjoy trick-taking games and are looking for one that both respects tradition and gleefully rebels against it, Rebel Princess is well worth your time.
A pre-release review codewas provided by Direwolf Digital. I played the Steam version of The Fox and the Forest.
Trick taking games are a tale as old as time and have been ubiquitous throughout my growing up. My mom had a group of three other ladies who would gather and play Hearts until the wee hours of the morning. Later on in life, Euchre, Whist, and Spades were added to the rotation, with slight tweaks to the rules depending on who was joining the table that night and where they came from. As I got older, my family started playing Wizard during our reunions, and now we have reached the point where everyone in my family owns their own copy.
One thing most trick taking games have in common is that they often require three or more players. It is rare that a trick taking game works when only two players are at the table. Enter The Fox in the Forest by Joshua Buergel. The Fox in the Forest is a trick taking game for 2 players. No more, no less. Players are tasked with utilizing the cards in their hand to manipulate the game in order to win most of the tricks.
The Fox in the Forest offers a couple spins on the traditional trick-taking game model. First, there are only 3 suits available. Second, all of the odd cards have some kind of special ability that can spin the game in different ways, and third, you can earn a lot of points by losing nearly every trick.
How to Play
For anyone who hasn’t played a trick taking game before, some of these terms may be a bit foreign to you. Real quick talk about the core of almost all trick taking games – a trick is all the cards played in a round and ‘trump’ is the suit of cards that overpowers the other suits. In general, when the first player in a round ‘leads’ by playing a card, all subsequent players have to ‘follow’ by playing a card of the same suit if they have one. If someone doesn’t have a card of the lead suit, they’re free to play any card from their hand. Once all players have played a card, whoever played the highest card of the lead suit takes the trick, unless a trump card was played, in which case the player who played the highest trump card wins the trick.
With that out of the way, you now have the basic rules to dozens of games. What makes The Fox and the Forest special is how it takes that basic concept and offers clever wrinkles and ways to manipulate the game state. Let’s talk about what The Fox and the Forest does differently.
First, Each player is dealt 13 of the 33 card deck, with the remaining 7 cards being set aside as the draw deck. The top card of the draw deck is flipped faceup. The faceup card is called the Decree, and dictates which suit has ‘trump’.
The non-dealer player leads on the first trick of a round. After that, unless specified otherwise, the winner of the last trick leads the following trick. The leader can play any card from their hand without restrictions. The follower must play a card of the same suit as the leader if they have one.
In The Fox and the Forest every odd card has a special ability. Those abilities are resolved as soon as the card is played, before any other cards are played or tricks are resolved. Some will have you drawing and discarding cards, others will have allow you to change the decree cards, and others will let you lead the next trick if you lose this one.
Play continues until all the cards in your hand have been played. At the end of the round each player totals how many tricks they won, and earn points based off the chart below. In general, you want to win more tricks than your opponent, but don’t get greedy or you’ll be punished with a big fat 0 points.
Shuffle all the cards back together and deal out another round. Play continues until someone meets or exceeds 21 points.
Review
My experience with the physical game has been a story of hardship and trials. I played The Fox in the Forest half a dozen times against the same opponent over the course of the last two years, and in every game I get pushed around. I start off the hand doing well, snagging up the first four tricks with no resistance, only to be denied every trick thereafter through my opponent’s clever card play. Or somehow even worse, to be deliberately giving away tricks, trying to achieve the Humble status, only to have tricks forced into my hand, causing me naught but pain.
The Fox in the Forest is a lovely game for a pair of players. Only being a 33 card deck instantly makes this a contender for travel or playing while out of the homestead. The art on the cards is lovely, and the theme is calm and serene. If you really want to get into the story, Foxtrot has published the fairy tale that inspired this design over on their website. Even more portable than a 33 card deck is your phone with the newly published app.
Direwolf Digital is no stranger to making digital adaptions to board games. Root and Sagrada both have excellent apps that live up to the excellent quality of game as it’s cardboard counterparts, but also exudes charm with subtle animations and good UX choices.
I enjoyed playing The Fox in the Forest on my computer. The sepia toned forest background made me feel at ease, in the same way that a lovely autumn walk does. The flourishes of colour and light when ‘cards’ are placed imbues a semi-magical feeling. My only qualm with the interface is that you had to drag the card to play it, not simply click it. I can only imagine that during playtesting someone was the victim of errant mis-clicks and the decision was made to set dragging your card as the best way to play.
The in-game tutorial does a very good job of walking you through the first half of a game, explaining what’s necessary to get you started before leaving you to discover the nuance of the special abilities on your own. Beyond the tutorial you have options to play locally against the AI (no pass and play options at time of this writing). I tried two games against each of the 3 levels of AI and honestly didn’t notice much of a difference in difficulty. I managed to thoroughly trounce each one of them, earning myself 7 or 8 points per round. I’d say maybe I just got lucky, but my experience with the card game and getting utterly trounced over and over tells me there’s more needed to win than luck.
The Fox in the Forest also includes challenges. The challenges offer different scenarios that introduce new aspects to the core gameplay of The Fox in the Forest. The challenge “Might Makes Right” throws out the Humble victory condition and tasks you with getting as many tricks as possible. The “Meek Shall Inherit” challenge flips the script with the player earning between 4 and 6 of the tricks earning the bulk of the points. One scenario randomizes your cards after every trick, and another adds an entire other suit! Each of these challenges come in two difficulty levels and offers a fun twist to test your mettle and mastery of the trick taking system.
Over all, I enjoyed the digital implementation of The Fox in the Forest. It’s fast to play, pretty to look at, and doesn’t waste your time with overly egregious animations. The Fox in the Forest is kind of game best played in a cool morning with a hot cup of tea while you slowly rouse yourself from your slumber. Direwolf Digital has created a faithful implementation of the original game, and has even offered interesting challenges to shake up the experience so the app isn’t just a plain recreation of the physical version. I’m hopeful there will be some updates, possibly with more challenges or with the implementation of a local pass and play feature. I’m excited to explore the online mode when The Fox in the Forest launches on Steam, iOS and Android on October 18th.
