Well how do we move that token about to collect these gems? All the cards have a hierarchical numerical value-a 3 beats 2, but loses to a 7 and so on-but on some of them they also include a movement value. Miss a single one after using up all your cards after three rounds and you lose, sending your jolly stroll through the forest astray. You see, in order to win Duet you must clear the forest from these gems. These spaces are attached to areas which hold gems-the ultimate true goal of the game. The lay of the land, or in this case this foresty-themed board, has a winding central path, dotted by spaces along the way in which you move about a token. The Fox and the Forest Duet bolts on a couple of ideas to the formula in order to marry two dissimilar mechanism into a cohesive whole, solely to serve the spatial area puzzle that sits in the middle of its players. Underneath it all, there is spatial puzzle you must traverse an underbrush that sits under a trick-taking canopy-and it is both ingenious and devious at the same time. In fact, cutting your mate, throwing cards under a trump suit, cursing under your breath as your partner wins a trick you needed to take…it’s just an overlay for the true journey you must endeavor with your companion.
How Duet, then, utilizes what we know about trick-taking games is, in my humble opinion, clever. And, finally, no talking to your chum across from you-you must infer information either intuitively or telepathically (this, I assume is the Duet part of the The Fox in the Forest Duet). Maneuvering your deck to best dictate who wins or loses a trick is still the optimal tactic. Trump suits still exist here, except there is no one defined suit (think Spades in this regard) and instead a trump suit is decided by a draw deck composed of all the spare cards not used in player’s hands. Tricks are won by playing a higher valued card over your companion. You might ask how a cooperative trick-taking game can work, and that will be answered shortly, but setting that aside, all the hallmarks of trick-taking games are still here. For one, strictly speaking from its predecessor, Duet switches from a competitive game to a cooperative one. Getting that out of the way, if you like trick-tacking games and are familiar with the genre, you’ll fall right in line with Duet-except that it makes a few changes to the formula to stimulate a different type of experience from the normalcies found within the category. I really appreciate that, and it bears repeating that game publishers should do everything in their power to minimize the overall footprint of a game. It’s a neat and tidy production, and it’s worth mentioning every inch of that box is taken up by the components. I’ll take a bit of a detour, there is a svelte box holding everything here-it’s a seriously tiny little thing, a cardboard critter-a 33-card deck, a board and some forest tokens and gems. Tricks and Treatsįox in the Forest Duet is the sequel to its previous trick-taking game, Fox in the Forest. I’m kicking myself for not playing this sooner! Let’s see why this collaborative game of tricks is such a delight. It's probably why it resonates so well with me, and why I think it’s one of the better small, filler games to come out last year. That essence is well translated into Fox in the Forest Duet.
For me, what did it, was the concept of partnership, of mind-melding with the person across from me trying to infer what they had in their hand, or the give and take of winning or losing a trick. It was our go-to game during lunch time, or whenever school days were less about studying and more about waiting for the clock hands to strike 3PM. I, and my friends, and even acquaintances, loved playing Spades. If we were going to welcome the last hour of our childhood, Spades was going to be the way to do it. Legs of desks rattled on linoleum, screeching, while someone pulled out a deck of cards, soon split into hands corralled by eager fingers, organizing and placing like suits together. After finishing exams, inking the pages of countless yearbooks and talking with friends of the very real decisions that will come in the next steps of our lives, our teacher gave us the last hour of the final day of our high school year all to ourselves. One of my most vivid memories involving a trick-taking game came on my last day of high school. Published by: Renegade Games Created by: Foxtrot Games
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