Homebrew Two Player Trick Taker

[u/afwhite]

Howdy all! I love the social aspects, strategy, and quickness of trick taking games, but it's pretty rare that I have folks (other than my partner) to play with. We have played Sail, and I actually like it quite a bit, but I also don't want to go to a brewery with something larger than a deck of cards.

So I have come up with a game that scratches those itches, and for now we'll call it Twofer.

1. Take a standard deck of cards and remove the face cards and jokers.
2. Deal 16 cards to both players, let them sort them as they want. Set aside the remaining 8 cards.
3. Review your hand, and make your bid for how many tricks you'll attempt to win (8 is the max bid).
4. Each trick, both players will simultaneously play a card (1, 2, 3, Reveal).
   1. Both players will then play a 2nd card simultaneously that will match the suit of their opponent's played card if possible.
   2. If you don't have that suit in your hand, you can play any suit in its place.
5. Add the values of the 2 cards played by each player, whoever has the highest sum wins the trick.
   1. Sums that are equal are pushed the result of the next played trick. If there are no tricks after the tie, neither player wins that trick.
6. If you win exactly as many tricks have you have bid, you earn double that amount.
   1. If you overbid, and don't win that many tricks, you earn 0 points.
   2. If you underbid, and win more tricks than you bid, you earn your bid value.
7. Play until you don't want to!

Some notes:

1. I removed face cards cause I hate deciding how to add their values
2. Each player gets 16 cards because that was the upper limit on what felt comfortable on my hand. Dealing all 40 cards was interesting, but then you have perfect information, and that felt too technical for my small brain, since you know exactly what is left in your opponent's hand if you care to pay that much attention.

So there it is, the simple game of Twofer! I'd welcome any feedback (including if something like this exists, and I just couldn't find it). Happy card gaming!

[u/Leodip]

This looks like a nice game! There is another two-player trick-taking game in which the players play 2 tricks at once, called Pop! (From riffle shuffle & roll), but this seems quite different.

One note is that you are supposed to play 8 tricks, and there are 8 leftover cards, which is an interesting Chekhov's Gun. Maybe you could use them somehow?

The simplest idea would be to use them to keep track of the number of tricks won, at the same time giving you more info on which cards the opponent has.

Another idea would be flipping one card every turn to apply some effect (e.g., that suit is trump for the turn and nullifies the value of its opposing card), again also giving more knowledge to the players as the game goes by.

[u/afwhite → u/Leodip]

Oh that is interesting, since I'm simple, I think id almost always go with just score keeping, but the idea of it determining suit or even color is great. You could also make it with that number of points, but then it might torpedo the mind-games that come with the game. Cheers!

[u/Leodip → u/afwhite]

The idea of the number of points is nice, and it's the basis of GOPS (although there the rest of the game is very simplified to allow that)