Card Game

Coyote

One day Coyote crossed the river with his friends, but he was carrying too many things and almost drowned before Bear pulled him out of the water. Poor Coyote had lost everything.

They sat down by a fire to dry off and rest. Coyote became jealous of the other animals because they still had all their things, so he challenged them to a bluffing game to win their belongings. The other animals agreed to the challenge as they thought Coyote would never win. After all, he is known to never tell the truth — but in this game everybody has to lie because no one knows the truth...

In the bluffing game Coyote, you always see the cards of the other players, but never your own. When it's your turn, you must announce a number that is less than the total of all the cards in the game, yet higher than the previous number given. Alternatively, you can challenge the number previously announced. Finally, when all the cards are revealed, you'll see who has the cunning Coyote on their side.

Coyote is in the same game line as Spicy, with the game box and card backs being decorated with a special metallic print in copper. As in the tradition of the Northwest Coast Tribes, copper is a symbol of prosperity and cultural wealth.

The artist Zona Evon Shroyer (Yupik Alaskan Native) is a master of the traditional Northwest Coastal art, whose richness of detail and complexity requires years of study and practice. For the cover illustration of Coyote, she designed a modern silhouette for the coyote, which she then filled in a classical manner with other animal motifs: turtle, beaver, and bear — the animals that he is sitting around the fire with and playing a game, in our little story.

—description from the publisher

TRICKTAKERs

TRICKTAKERs is a...trick-taking game featuring role selection. After being dealt a hand of cards, the players choose from various characters (such as King or Gambler) that change how they will participate in the game.

The basic game consists of three rounds of trick-taking, and the winner will be the person that wins the most tricks in two of the three rounds. Alternatively, if no one achieves that condition, if a player has taken no tricks in all three rounds, they will be the winner.

Not mentioned above, the game also has a higher priority victory condition and a lower one. Each character in the game grants the player holding it a special "immediate victory" condition that could be achieved. The characters also give the players ways to earn points, and this is the lowest tier of victory determination: who has the most points.

To illustrate some of the character abilities, the Gambler can discard cards from the initial hand to draw replacements, and will bid for how many tricks they take, possibly granting them extra points if successful. The Resistance has the potential to cause a "revolution" which reverses the strength of the ranks, and earns more points if they can win tricks with what would normally be the "high" cards.

Haggis

Haggis is a climbing game in the same family as Zheng Fen and Big Two. It borrows and recombines elements from its parent games - card combinations, bombs, scoring for cards in hand, scoring for cards collected in tricks - and it mixes in equally distributed wild cards and betting that you'll be the first to empty your hand of cards.

Codenames: The Simpsons

Codenames: The Simpsons combines the hit social word game Codenames, while featuring characters and locations from thirty years of The Simpsons.

In Codenames, two teams — Team Homer and Team Bart — compete to see who can guess all of their "field agents" (identified by either a word or picture) correctly first — but those field agents are hiding in plain sight in a 5x5 grid that includes the agents of the other team, neutral words, and an assassin that will cause you to lose the game immediately if you guess it. One person on each team is a spymaster and only these two know which agents belong to each team. Spymasters take turns giving one-word clues that can help their teammates identify multiple agents on the board. Their teammates try to guess agents of the right color while avoiding those that belong to the opposing team — and everyone wants to avoid the assassin.