Latest / Operation Game Night / Fives, Gachapon Trick, And Rebel Princess For Fans Of Clever Card Play

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Fives, Gachapon Trick, And Rebel Princess For Fans Of Clever Card Play · Operation Game Night

• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Operation Game Night podcast.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Clay and I are back together again, and I missed Jared showing up on the podcast, and I'm very sad about it.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm your host, Travis Smith.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is Operation Game Night.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're going to talk some trick takers that Clay has played.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Clayton, how are you?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing great, Travis.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was super sad that you missed out on the little uh Jared love sesh we had about Moon Colony Bloodbath.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't feel right, but regardless, we gave the people what they wanted and we got Jared back on for an episode.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that was a lot of fun.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, trick taking games.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: We are talking about a few that I've played lately because trick takers are games that I generally like to buy.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up playing trick taking games.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: I find the novelty and interesting twists that keep getting thrown at the genre to be a real hoot.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you know, if one comes out and it looks interesting, I'm usually gonna pick it up and give it a try.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna talk about three today.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna talk about fives, we're gonna talk about Gachapon Trick and Rebel Princess.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: So the first one is fives.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: This came out in the magenta line of games from CMYK.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And uh this one I was who who designed this?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Taiki Shinzawa.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: This name should sound familiar to you if you're a trick taker trick taker enthusiast, designed a ton of great games um in the genre.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: This one is really interesting, it's got two main hooks.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: So the first one is that every card on the back of it has a magenta five.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: So every card can be played as a magenta five.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: So when you're playing out tricks and it's your turn, only one person can do this per trick.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: But if somebody decides, like, hey, I just want to lead this trick with a magenta five, they can flip their card over, it's now a magenta five, and that's a good way to like maybe get rid of a card that you didn't want to win with later on, maybe it was a high card, but it adds a really interesting dynamic to the game.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing is you're trying to win with cards that equal 25 by the end of the round.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: So if I win a trick and the card I won it with was a five, that adds to my tally.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: So at the end of the round, if I won with a five, a four, and a three, my total for the round would be twelve.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the goal is to be the closest to twenty-five out of anybody playing.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: So as you look at your hand of cards, you're trying to assess, like, okay, I've got, you know, a 10 here, I can definitely win with.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: So that's 10 points in the bag.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what of these other cards might I be able to win with to try and get to that magical 25 number or close to 25?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: If you end up going over 25 with the tricks you won, you bust and you have to pay the person who got closest to 25 one of your points.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the person who got closest to 25 gets the most amount of points.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: This is that the person who got second closest gets a lesser amount of points.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then if you busted, you have to pay the people or person who got closest to 25 some of your own points.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the main thing.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh fives was super fun.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: I really thought it was interesting.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, that twist about the fives being on the back of every card and just deciding when to do that.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because, like I said, you get into these situations where you would have had to follow suit.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like maybe you only had one blue card left, and you would have had to follow suit and it would have made you win this trick.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: But you're like, okay, I can just flip this over.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's now a magenta five, it loses, somebody else won that trick.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm safe.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: But only one person can do that per trick.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: So like it, you don't know for sure if you're gonna get away with it, but it just adds some really interesting decisions.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: And for people who are familiar with trick-taking games, I don't think it those two core twists to the game, like trying to get your total trick-winning cards value to equal 25, and then being able to use the fives, like those are pretty minor twists to what otherwise is a you know simple must-follow trick-taking game where somebody plays a blue, you have to follow with a blue.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: There's the silver trump suit, and you know, that's pretty standard rhythm to that.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, really happy with this one.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: I am definitely looking forward to playing it more.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and how many round, how many tricks per round?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So uh like how many, like let's say you win, I don't know.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: You said you win three tricks and it totals 12, but is it three tricks per round?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is it until everyone's out of cards?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how long so you play till everybody's out of cards?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I think at the you'll have uh and the plan depends on player count.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that you know there's you know 10 to 12 tricks available per round.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you know people, I mean you're gonna probably win a handful of those tricks, and it's just like, okay, do I want to win with big numbers early and then try and lose the rest of the round?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, because it happened to me a couple times I did that, you know, I come out, I'm like, oh boom, one with a 10, one with a 10.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm at 20, and now I'm trying to skate by the rest of the round without winning any more.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, you I play it wrong, like I usually do, and I end up taking a trick at the very end that puts me over 25.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, it was just such an interesting dynamic.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think this game accomplishes a lot with a couple tiny little twists.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I always hate that feeling when you're like, let's say you bet that you're gonna win zero tricks, or you're at the very end and you have to avoid getting tricks.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: I hate that feeling, especially because I'm really bad at trick takers in general and trying to avoid winning tricks when I, you know, purposefully losing tricks, I guess.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so bad at I hate it.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's talk about Gotchapon trick.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really interested in this one.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Gotchapon trick.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so gotcha pond trick is I I feel like I can't there, I'll say interesting way too many times in this episode because people that's what it is to me.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: I I need to get a thesaurus up and have interesting with a bunch of alternative words.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: But this trick-taking game combines set collection in there.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: So the theme is you know, you're I don't I never even heard of what this is.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm guessing it's Japanese, a gacha pawn machine.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, um, but it looks like one of those machines just put quarters in and a little toy comes out of the bottom.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so basically, you're trying to collect sets of these toys through this trick-taking game.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody starts out with a fat stack of money in gacha pawn trick.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a you know trick-taking game.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody starts, there's seven suits.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody starts with a blue.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: You have to play a blue if you have it, but if you don't have a blue, you can play any other color.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then subsequent players can play, they can follow either suit.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you can either play the blue or the suit that somebody else had played.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then at the end of the trick, whichever suit had the most cards of it played to that trick, so not necessarily the lead suit.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: If I played blue and then the next two people played pink, well, now the highest pink card wins the trick.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: And when you win the trick, you have to buy cards from the trick.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: So each card has like uh the the strength of the card is like also the amount that that card costs to buy.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe it costs 800 yen to buy this little frog pooping on a toilet, and that's one of the cards.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um, so when you win the trick, you have to buy at least one of those toys.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: You can buy as many as you want, but again, you're trying to collect sets of the same type of toys, and it's just a you know, a squared type of scoring metric where if I have two of the same type of toy, it's worth four.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: If I have three, it's worth nine.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: If I have four, it's worth 16.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: So you win the trick, you get the option to buy cards that are out there.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: You can buy as many as you want, but you have to buy one, and you also get the fun little choice to go ahead and put 500 yen in the gotchapon machine and draw a card off the top of the deck to and and then it's just like a random card that you get to add to your set collection.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Do you actually get to put a coin in the box?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: The box has a little the box has a little hole in it, and you get to put a coin in, and you get to take a little toy, and you know, hopefully it matches what you're collecting, but if not, it was still the right thing to do because that's just fun.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you go around like this, and it it's I it's a weird dynamic because there's a lot of things that you don't normally consider in trick-taking games, like the whole economy of having to buy things, yeah.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because I really overestimated how much if you don't spend any money, you can still end the round with like 30 points.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Oh because your leftover money actually counts for a lot.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I was like, oh my god, I got 50,000 yen or 5,000 yen or whatever.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna I'm I'm just buying everything.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: I win a trick, I'm buying all the cards that are out there because why not?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I ended up not having a successful round of collecting sets.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then Mary, she had a ton of leftover money, and I'm like, how the heck?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: She got like 25 more points than me, and she has way less cards.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: So you really have to be judicious about what you buy and what you play out into the trick.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it's because in a normal trick-taking game, if I lead with the strongest card of a suit, your natural instinct is to throw off a low-value card.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and you have to fight that instinct because now the person that wins the trick can buy that low value card and it's cheap.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: So so you're giving them a card that they might want and they can buy it for cheap.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: But also now you're like, okay, well, I don't want to get rid of my high card because I want to win a trick later.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it adds a really interesting mind game to it.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's a lot of fun.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it was a hoot, and that that little touch of the production of just having that little coin slot in there and getting to put your coins in when you want to buy stuff and drawing the cards off the top.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's awesome.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is a cool little trick-taking game.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: I like that it adds the set collection.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: I like that you can not win any tricks and still do all right.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that seems like it might be hard to do.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, this was this was a fun time.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: I put I've only played it once, but I am very excited to play it some more.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think this one showed up on my social media feeds as like a pre-order or something.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I was kind of clicking around and I saw the clip of somebody like putting a coin in the box, and I was like, oh man, I'm I'm sold.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Just that it's so gimmicky, but yeah, I love it.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: I love things that are a little bit meta about a game.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, I've talked about um what is that?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's off the oh, I can't remember what it is.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's gonna bug me.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: But the one where you roll the dice through the tree that's built into the box.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: I love stuff like that.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's so cool.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, Harrow, Harrow County, Harrow County, like that.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a gothic horror kind of murder mystery type game, but you can roll dice, they have like a big tree on the box, and the box and the tree has a little opening at the bottom, and you can roll the dice through the box and it will spit out your dice roll.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, and the theme on this is just fun.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Mary was she, you know, I asked her to play this, and she's like, Is this a new game?
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then the second she got dealt the cards with these weird little like Japanese toys on them from this machine, she's like, uh, you could see her light up a little bit, you know, it got through to her cold little heart.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Love it, and then and then I know she had a good time with this one, so we'll probably be playing this some more.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay, one more.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Let me hear about your last game, uh Rebel Princess.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, Rebel Princess.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: This is a pretty popular one, it's been out for a few years now.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh this is a take on the classic game of hearts.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're familiar with hearts, it's a you don't want to win tricks type of game.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: So in hearts, you're trying to avoid winning tricks that have hearts in them.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: And in Rebel Princess, the theme is you're princesses, and there's a suit of cards that are princes that are trying to propose to you, and so you're trying to have the least amount of proposals at the end of the game.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, standard trick-taking game, follow suit, whatever.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: But if you happen to win a trick with a proposal, those are negative points.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there is a frog, and this is like hearts as well.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: In hearts, the queen of spades, I think it is, yeah, is like the big bad that if you accidentally win the queen of spades, it's worth like negative 10 points or something.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a frog in the in the uh green suit that's masquerading as a prince, or it's a prince masquerading as a frog.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: But if you accidentally win that um that card, you get like negative four proposals, or you get four proposals, which are bad.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so the thing that makes this game different is that they add in, they there's five rounds, and each round there's like a round twist that says, like, oh, in this round, you know, low cards are actually the highest cards or whatever, you know, things like that.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: And each person has their own princess that every round you can activate your princess ability once that gives you, you know, some unique thing, like, oh, I can I don't have to follow suit when something happens or whatever.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um I like this game, I think it's a great like intro trick-taking game.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: I just I don't like abilities.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and then that that's what this game is.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like it, you know, if you it's hearts, but you have all these special abilities.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: When I've played it with people, most people just forget that they even have a princess ability and are just playing basically hearts, you know.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then the the round goals are kind of interesting because they're easier to keep track of because everybody's working off the same sheet of music, like in this round, everybody knows this one thing, but you're playing with five or six people.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I think this might go to six people, maybe five people, five different princess abilities.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's about the same uh beef I had with um origin story.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and a lot of it's just personal, my personal preference that I don't like having to keep track of what other people might be able to do.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like I like a trick-taking game like the ones we just talked about, where the core twists of it are incorporated into the gameplay at its roots and aren't based on some you know card abilities that you know change up all the time.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I think if you like that type of thing and you want a good intro trick-taking game, Rebel Princess is great.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I do like generally like hearts is one of my favorite, you know, classic card games because I love that you know, not winning tricks, like trying to lose is one of my favorite things to do in trick-taking games.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I'm a great loser.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that I was really excited about this one, and I still enjoy playing it, but I largely just find myself ignoring what the princess abilities, which is like the whole thing.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that's that's kind of an interesting thing that happens when people try to adapt older games that are familiar to people, and they try and come up with this new creative spin on them.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: You have to find a way to avoid getting people to just fall into their old ways, right?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like hearts has been around for generations.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like your grandparents probably taught you hearts back in the day.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, and now you are asking people to like relearn a rule to a game that's already existing, and sometimes it's easy to just fall back in that old way of going through the motions of playing hearts because that's what you love to play anyway.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, that's that's kind of an interesting twist on this type of trick taker.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I'm really you know, between this and origin story, I think I'm rounding out my opinions of what I think is a trick-taking game that I should be pursuing versus you know, ones that just probably aren't for me, you know.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, and another fun thing about hearts and about Rebel Princess is you have the ability to shoot the moon.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: So if you start catching a lot of proposals, you can try and win them all and catch every single proposal.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then if you do that, you get like plus minus 10 points or whatever.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: So um you I I I generally like when a game has a way for you to really try and go for it all like that and risk it big.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so this has that, hearts has that.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I these are just three trick takers I've played recently.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: I if I had to rank them, I'd say I was most charmed by Gotchapon trick, and that's definitely intrigued me because of the the weird economy system and buying cards.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's just out there.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't quite wrapped my head around it.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think fives is just solid, like that is a solid trick-taking game.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: I will keep around forever.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: And Rebel Princess is just made me want to play hearts.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I I have not played, I guess I've played fives before, once upon a time, uh, but I think gotcha pan right now is really piquing my interest.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: I I you know you see so many board games on your social media feeds, it's good to see one come back around on the podcast.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm definitely interested in that one.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, I think gachapon games and like that market in general is super interesting.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: The theme is interesting.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you don't know anything about gachapon games at all?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: No, I have no idea what this is.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: I just it looks like a thing that I may have seen before.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: So in Japan, there are like casinos that you would go to gamble, but in those casinos, there's gotcha pawn games, and there's like tons of people of different companies that develop gacha pawn games, and some of them spin off into weird like video games or uh you know other industries, but these gotcha pan games are a huge moneymaker.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: You can find them in the drugstores, in the in the 7-Elevens, in the casinos, like and they're literally just those little capsules that you collect with the toys in them, and they have like limited edition little toys and keychains and things that you get.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: They're kind of like the little egg things that you get from I don't know, your if you're going to Applebee's for dinner or whatever, they have those little shell things, right?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh, it's kind of like that, but those like much higher quality.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: So okay.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's pretty cool.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, definitely check it out.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think you would get a kick out of it.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Heck yeah.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Did we do it?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: We did it.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: You talked a lot.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you debriefing these three games.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is a a small grab bag, just a a baby's handful of uh trick takers that we went over today.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: So let us know which ones you want to try or that you have played and what you think of them.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, give Clay some love for his fantastic debrief, as always.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, give us a like, like and subscribe, share the podcast.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: We're always trying to grow and uh tell us what we can do better.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I have been Travis, he has been Clayton.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: This has been Operation Game Night, and we are out.