12 Chip Trick, the clever and minimalist trick game

What is a board game? 12 Chip Tricks?

The small, nicely illustrated box is not cluttered with a vague theme. What matters is the mechanics, the gameplay. And that’s good, from that perspective it’s very successful, and renews the genre.

Accessible from 8 years old, for 2 to 4 3 players, and games lasting around twenty minutes, it mixes the principle of trick play and blackjack .

Published by Mandoo Games, 12 Chip Tricksis a Root game, illustrated by Chong, and sold at the price of €16.95 at Philibert.

Rules of the game 12 Chip Tricks

Set up

Setup only takes a few seconds. We mix the 12 tokens (hence the name of the game) face down, and we distribute 2 red and 2 blue to each player.

And that’s all !

These tokens are numbered: 1 to 3 and 10 to 12 for blue, 4 to 9 for red. Coasters, set aside at the start of the game, are used to count the number of rounds won by the players.

Progress of a game

To win a round, you must make the highest score… but without exceeding 21 (as in blackjack).

On your turn, you place a token from your hand in the center of the table. Any one, whatever you want.

When everyone has played, the person who placed the highest value collects the token of their choice, and places it aside, in their scoring area. Well, not just any token, since if a red token is present, it must be taken as a priority over the blue ones.

The other players, in turn order, also collect a token, but put it back in their hand. A new round then begins, where everyone puts down a token, and so on, until one of the players no longer has a token in hand.

Then comes the time to count your score. In addition to the tokens won and placed in your score zone, you also add the tokens you still have in your hand. We add everything up, and the highest score wins the round… except those who exceed 21, who are automatically eliminated.

The game ends as soon as someone has won 3 rounds.

Why play 12 Chip Tricks?

Between Skull King, Cat in the Box, Mino Dice , The Crew , we’re going through some of the best, trick games are on the rise. And yet each of them brings something new, something original, which makes you want to come back, without duplicating its predecessors. Enough to replace the venerable belote or tarot.

And 12 Chip Tricks is no exception to this rule.

However, it has the advantage of being one of the simplest to understand. So simple in fact that reading the rules left us a little doubtful about the interest of the game.

Our opinion on 12 Chip Tricks

What a mistake! Because as minimalist as it is (you only need 12 tokens), it is exciting to play. Not the first round, it must be admitted, where we play completely at random, as we don’t understand what to do, where we obviously haven’t yet integrated all the subtleties of the game.

But from the next, the 3 players really get into the game. We try to remember who has which chips. We are helped, because we know the colors of others’ tokens, but by their value. The more the round progresses, the more tokens are placed in the scoring zones, and the more information we have.

We then try to guess what the others will play, the chip they will take. We try to be sometimes the one who wins the trick, sometimes the player right after, to regain control of an interesting chip. In short, the games are exciting and engaging.

We specify “3 players” because even if the box indicates 2 to 4, that is not really the case. You can play it with 2 people, but it’s a variant with a ghost player, not very interesting. You can also play it with 4 people, by adding other value tokens that already exist. Here too, the game loses its interest.

We could also raise eyebrows at the fact that the chips, although pleasant to handle, like poker chips, are on the other hand less practical to hold in the hand than simple cards. And probably make the game more expensive. And that’s true.

Apart from these two small pitfalls, 12 Chip Tricksis a real playful nugget. It is beautiful, simple (once you understand the ins and outs, after one or two rounds), clever as anything, and with material reduced to its strictest minimum, as the authors and authors know how to do so well. Asian publishers. A playful principle dictates that the creation of a game is not finished when we can no longer add anything to it, but rather when we can no longer take anything away from it. 12 Chip Tricksis concrete proof of this. And if you doubt it, try it online at Board Game Arena.

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