Armed with my new inspiration, and keeping to my theme of melding spells with a traditional card game, I re-designed it into a two-player, trick-taking game.Īfter playtesting and refining this version of the game for a while, and seeing the potential, I finally arrived at a version of the game that I was comfortable showing to blind playtesters. Aside from a small handful of games, I couldn’t really think of any modern takes on the category. What struck me is that two-player trick-taking games are woefully underrepresented in the hobby. Piquet, in particular, is an excellent game that I’ve enjoyed in the past. In reading through the book, I took inspiration from Piquet and Écarté, both two-player trick-taking games. I knew I wanted to keep it to a two-player version, and I wanted the scoring to reflect both actions in play as well as the end of the hand. I retreated with my beloved copy of David Parlett’s “The Penguin Book of Card Games” for inspiration. After I tortured some of my friends with my early magical Cribbage variants, I decided that path probably wouldn’t work. Cribbage was the Buergel family game growing up, a game that my uncles, parents, and grandfather all played, and is the game I have been playing the longest in my life. I was looking at trying to create a magical variant of Cribbage. At the time, our vision for it was to include several games in the box. Grant Rodiek and I were working on Hocus back in early 2014, a game that is basically Poker with spells. The Fox in the Forest started life as a much different game. This push-and-pull in scoring provides the same sorts of tension that can be found in classic games like Spades and Hearts. But, if you get greedy and win too many tricks, you’ll fall like the villain in many fairy tales and score no points for the round. Players score points based on the number of tricks they win in a round. These special abilities provide players with many tools to control the flow of play and disrupt their opponent’s plans. These cards have special abilities that activate when played: letting you change the trump suit, lead despite losing the trick, and so on.

Half of the cards represent fairy tale characters, like a Fox or a Witch, with beautiful illustrations by storybook artist Jennifer L.

I wanted to provide that same type of experience, but in a two-player game, letting players get that same classic, trick-taking feel with only one other player.Īs in many trick-taking games, players have a hand of cards with suits and ranks. I’ve had a passion for trick-taking games most of my life, going back to a high school experience filled with games of Bridge and Pinochle. It is first and foremost my love letter to trick-taking games. The Fox in the Forest is a new card game from Foxtrot Games and Renegade Game Studios coming out this Summer 2017.

The fox in the forest book