Great cooperative trick-taking games

Cooperative trick-taking games started having a real moment about six years ago.

The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine (Sing, 2019) broke on to the scene in quick fashion, where it made pretty immediate waves. Some have credited it with sparking the trick-taking renaissance, and while I’m not sure it’s quite so clear cut, it’s certainly obvious it had an outsized impact on trick-taking games. As a cooperative campaign, it hits every note perfectly: It introduces trick-taking smoothly, it ramps in difficulty really nicely, and it introduces new concepts just when you start to get comfortable.

Understanding the trick-taking renaissanceLooking at the rise of trick-taking games from a data-driven perspectiveDon't Eat the MeeplesMatt Montgomery

The Crew just works. In part it works because the underlying trick-taking mechanics are straightforward: It’s a must-follow game and there’s a trump suit. That’s it. All the interesting bits come during the campaign, and each mission sort of makes sense as part of the larger whole.

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea (Sing, 2021) takes everything great about The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, jumbles it all up, and spits out a highly variable experience. Most missions you play feature a task difficulty level, and you’ll meet that difficulty level by drawing from a deck of task cards. Sometimes they’re straightforward, other times they’re anything but. The most remarkable thing about this game is that it works in the first place.

Mission Deep Sea is a clear extension of the series’ underlying mechanics, but it accomplishes it all in a way that feels a bit different to experienced players. They both very much have their place, at least in my collection — there’s definite overlap, so you might have to decide between a more guided experience and a more variable experience if you’re only interested in one, but I think you’ll find you can just play the two back-to-back.

The Crew: Journey to the Center of the Earth (Sing, 2026) is the third iteration of the game, and it’s not yet been released, and we know very little about it. I could just pretend it doesn’t exist, but maybe you’re excited about its forthcoming nature. I am.

All three games were designed by Thomas Sing, and the first two (and perhaps the third) were illustrated by Marco Armbruster. All three are published by KOSMOS.

Sail | Photo by Matt Montgomery

Sail (Koryo and Yusei, 2023) — a reimplementation of the pair’s 2021 HAMELN CAVE — is another campaign, but the campaign is quite a bit shorter in length. It’s also the first game here that uses a map, and by first, I mean the only one. I won’t go into much depth here, but that’s only because I wrote about it just a few weeks ago. You might have already read it.

I ought to mention the forthcoming Sail Legacy (Reiner, 2026), which we don’t know a ton about, but it’s designed by one of the trick-taking greats, Taylor Reiner. I’m excited for this one’s release. Anyway, here's that link.

How Sail succeeds as a two-player cooperative gameThis trick-taking game is constantly making players reprioritize.Don't Eat the MeeplesMatt Montgomery

Counterpoint | Photo by Matt Montgomery

Counterpoint (Schaller, 2026) is a cooeprative trick-taking game steeped in classical music. It’s absolutely not a campaign game, but by the same token, it could be, if you wanted it to be. The basic trick-taking play (must follow, trump suit determined by one of the undealt cards) isn’t that unusual, but there’s a fun twist here. Each player adds a suit to the deck, and you’ll start each round by bidding on the number of cards you think you’ll win of your suit.

Each time you play the game, you’ll be selecting a piece of music you’ll be performing. And you’re picking from all sorts of classical pieces — it’s clear designer Ted Mann Schaller is very into classical music. As you leaf through the pieces, you’ll uncover all sorts of interesting rules that are specific to the music at hand. Perhaps you’ll try Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17 , with the rules ‘Establishing theme’ (one player commits to winning the first two tricks) and ‘Alto voice’ (one player commits to having no melody cards — trump cards — in their collection at the end of the performance). Or perhaps you’ll take on something more difficult, like Camille Saint-Saëns’ Piano Trio in F major, Op. 18 , where you’ll be passing cards mid-round, but you have to bid very precisely. (I did notice there’s no P.D.Q. Bach here, which is what I’ve been listening to and very much cracking up over while writing this section.)

Having played Counterpoint with a group that’s finished both iterations of The Crew and is working its way through The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers — Trick-Taking Game , I can confidently say that Counterpoint twisted our brains just a bit. We’re (I hope!) alright at trick-taking, but there was still plenty of challenge for experienced players.

Notably, this isn’t a campaign — not naturally, at least. You’re instructed to pick a piece from the book according to the difficulty you’d like to play. You could very easily turn this into a campaign by just playing the pieces in the order they’re printed, if you’d like. In lieu of a story, you can read the nice notes about the music on each page. (I’d also encourage you to play the music in question while you play the game. It’s rare that there’s a canonical piece of music for a game, and in reflection, I’ve seen ways the pieces and the rules intersect.) I’m fascinated by this game. It feels like it could have adopted the structure of a campaign, but I appreciate that it didn’t. With this much variety, I think picking one of the 50 pieces, considering difficulty, and just giving it a go will be the easiest path to success.

The presentation here is excellent. The art is whimsical and light, but there’s a seriousness about it, too. The short note about each piece brings the theme to life, and it invites you to get curious about classical music. Playing with Ginny, a euphonium player (euphonist?), helped, too — give me a guitar tab and I can read it, but don’t ask me the difference between an 8th note and a 16th note (OK, I know it now. That’s not the point.) — she gave it context I didn’t have.

Counterpoint is on Kickstarter now with an estimated January fulfillment date.

Counterpoint was designed by Ted Mann Schaller and illustrated by Brandon Campbell. I was given a preview copy of Counterpoint by the designer for the sole purpose of review. I’ve linked to the Kickstarter page because I aim to support independent designers and publishers, not because there’s been any compensation.

Let’s turn now to the other series of games the headline probably brought to mind to you. The Lord of the Rings trick-taking games, The Fellowship of the Ring — Trick-Taking Game (Bornmueller, 2025) and The Two Towers — Trick-Taking Game (Bornmueller, 2026) are two of the most well-considered campaign trick-taking games I’ve played. The stories are just perfect for cooperation: You’ll basically be playing through the story of the books by taking on the roles of characters, each of which has a condition that must be met in order to continue past your current chapter.

It’s also the sort of game where you’ll find yourself wanting to explore it for yourself, not be told how each character plays. There’s a funny thing this game manages to pull off: It feels like a story, and it feels like there are twists and turns. Now, I’m very familiar with the story of the Lord of the Rings. As a young teenager, I desparately wanted to learn Quenya, and I’d practice the written form during my school classes. I know the story, and the fiction of the games don’t surprise me. Mechanically, the game pulls off surprises. I won’t mention them here, because the game really does excel when you explore those elements yourself. I’ll just put it this way: The number of times I thought, “Hey, this would make a great game on its own!” probably happened in at least a dozen unique chapters.

It's clear that these two games have excelled, and they've attracted a ton of attention for it. They're great examples of the stories you can tell with cards, of the struggle you can show in a totally detached context. The art does some work here, of course, but there's so much going on underneath that very nice looking surface.

The Kakapo: Buddy & Party (Suzuki and Tezuka, 2023) takes a little bit more of the Counterpoint approach, in that its mission-based but you can sort of jump around throughout the missions and feel good about it. Finally reprinted (in France, at least) — or rather, reimplemented — as Yami (2026), this is one of my favorite oddball trick-takers. It’s obviously cooperative (otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it here), and it’s also a polyomino tile placement game. You’ll basically be surrounding various birds with tiles of specific colors, and you’ll get to place tiles (though typically one) based on the winning card in the trick.

Thematically, you’re protecting birds, not hunting them, but sometimes the theme doesn’t quite match with the artwork. Funny stuff. I haven’t played Yami, so I can’t speak to the theme there, but I’m just so excited that I’ll be able to talk about this game in a context that’s not “hey, look at this cool thing you can’t get” — so, uh, I guess we should move on from this.

A few other cooperative trick-taking games deserve mentions here, if just in a little less depth.

• Kaware Sono Job (Mashikamaru, 2025), or Take Over That Job, is a cooperative effort from one of the greats — and it’s a pretty difficult game. I played it with some other very experienced trick-taking players and we struggled to achieve a great victory. You’re passing your hand around the table each round but achieving goals based on conditions specific to you, so it gets weird fast. I love it.
• Trickarus (Cannon, 2024) is one of my favorite trick-taking games, and it does have a cooperative mode that uses the same mechanics you’ll find in the game — but I don’t think it holds a candle to the standard play of the game.
• Fox in the Forest Duet (Buergel, 2020) is one of the games that introduced trick-taking to a wider audience, but I can take it or leave it.
• Septentrick (Tsukahara, 2025) is on my shelf just waiting for me to play it. It’s basically about the sinking of the Titanic.
• Lindyhop (Kaneko and Smeal, 2023) is about dancing, and there just aren’t many trick-taking games about dancing. It’s another I haven’t played, but I’d love to give this two-player trick-taker a whirl.
• LetterTricks (Wray, 2021) has a cooperative mode, but I actually haven’t played that mode — I’ve played it competitively, and it’s interesting because it’s a word-spelling trick-taker, and the deck consists of letters.
• Trick-Taking in Black and White: Hidden Numbers (Dejima, 2024) is one of two spin-offs from the excellent Trick-Taking in Black and White (Dejima, 2021). I’ve played two of the three in the series, but not this one.
• Bremen (S. Ando, 2016) predates every game on this list, but it’s hard to find for a reasonable-ish price. I’ll have to play it at TTUTCON this year.

It’s funny. In some ways, trick-taking has been popularized among new crowds because of cooperative play, but it’s also a very small fraction of the genre. We’ve managed to talk about nearly every cooperative trick-taking game here today — that ought to tell you a lot. Now, will this particular set of mechanics continue to grow in reach? I think so. There’s something about trick-taking that lends itself to cooperative play.

Anyway, I'll see you all next week. Hope you're well, and happy gaming!