She's still pretty mentally acute, but I'm not sure she would have the motivation to learn a complex set of new rules, even if she could handle them. I get the impression Duet better captures the teamwork and silent communication though cards you get with your partner in Solo, but is also a bit more complex. I was thinking it could be really nice to get her a two-player trick-taking game she can play with my mum, so she has more options than just Scrabble and occasionally Hand and Foot (similar to Canasta). She used to play Solo (apparently it's also called Whist) a lot with her friends, who are all now dead. ![]() (If I knew anything about dancing I'd come up with a clever comparison but I zoned out about halfway through Showtunes Week of Strictly.) That makes the game feel cooperative in a way which I think is a pretty impressive achievement.My grandma's 98th birthday is coming up. For one thing it became apparent that, despite the linear board, you couldn't merely sweep from one side of the track to the other, completing spaces one-by-one it's much swingier than that, with the generally high movement values forcing you to make big steps back and forth across the board, hoping to land in the right places on each new hop, and that in turn means you generally want to swap the lead between you rather than have one player guide the other pace-by-pace for the whole round. (If you haven't played: the winner of a trick sums the paw values of both cards and moves the team's tracker that many spaces many cards have 2 paws and a couple 3, which on a board of only 11 spaces is a pretty big deal.) But I'm glad to say that the remaining plays went better and I enjoyed them much more. From discussion it seems like I'm not the only one to bounce off it - I'm not saying I want to win a cooperative game on the first try, even on the lowest difficulty, but traversing the forest searching for gems felt like an impossible mess, with way too many paws on all the cards and much less interaction with the leftover cards than in the versus game. Pleasingly, in one of this month's games, aiming low did come off and was vital to my win in the last of this month's games it completely failed, possibly because I was attempting to take treasures at the same time, but at least those two experiences combine to suggest that maybe the game wasn't becoming quite as one-note as I thought it might be.įunnily enough, this is also what it will look like if I ever form a band.ĭuet was a bit harder going. In recent plays I'd been finding that your opponent 'going humble' (taking three or fewer tricks, which yields 6 unanswered points for them because you were 'greedy') seemed less a convincing threat and more something that just had to be worked around, and that with most hands I could fairly safely pinpoint four 'losers' in my hand to negate that risk. It's got beautiful art and tense decisions. The original is still a fine two-player trick-taker, with just enough hidden information and hand manipulation to prevent it being a dry exercise in calculation. ![]() Of the two versions, I'd only played The Fox in the Forest before, six times the two versions got three plays each this month. ![]() We finally won on the easiest difficulty at the third time of asking, which probably bodes well for the game's challenge factor.
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