Since I last shared my progress here, I’ve added two new officially licensed games to Trickster’s Table (my weekend/free-time project for the past two years!): Six of VIII (designed by Carol LaGrow), and Kansas City: The Trick-Taking Game (designed by Chris Wray). I received permission to use the unique and appealing original game art from both Megan Russel for Kansas City and Daniel Newman for The Six of VIII.
Trickster’s Table is a free ($0.00, ad-free, microtransaction-free) app where development is funded exclusively by supporters who get to vote on which features and games will be added to future releases. You can find out more at https://www.patreon.com/c/TrickstersTable. 50% of the contributions are shared with the designers of the games. I’ll put up a new quality of life poll for votes on feature improvements or for adding a new game soon.
Kansas City and The Six of VIII are great representatives of the modern trick taking wave. They are easy to pick up since the core mechanics are immediately recognizable but have new innovative hooks that add interesting wrinkles to the gameplay. The hook in Kansas City is that, when you lose a trick, you can choose to upgrade one of your cards to trump. The Six of VIII has suits that represent the six wives of Henry VIII and last as long as each queen’s reign along with several other thematic tweaks including a King card and a Church of England card that lets a team annul a trick. Mastering the new strategies enabled by these hooks offers a rewarding challenge for players.
The win rate for bots in Kansas City is currently 68% (3 of the 4 players in a game are bots so with some questionable math human-level bots would win 2.25% more often so I won’t tweak the rewards for that game further).
The win rate for the bot team in Six of VIII from the beta test is 46%. Given that there are two teams in the game, that’s a decent win rate. Granted, not all the humans that play it are experts so I’ll keep an eye on the win rate and comments and add intermediate and hard modes if necessary.
