There is bidding that lets you call out your trump suit (unlike Spades), there is none of this “one player sits out every game” found in Bridge’s dummy (or Bridge’s hefty learning curve due to bidding conventions), and the somewhat unique scoring that relies on specific cards allows interesting interplay between partners, sacrificing future powerful cards in order to pass valuable point cards to your partner in the present trick. In addition to the fond memories of playing this game with my grandparents, aunts, and uncles, I find Rook to be one of my favorite trick-taking games. Points are scored via collecting 1’s (considered high in a suit – essentially “15’s”), 5’s, 10’s, and the Rook card.

The standard game, however, is a trick taking game along the lines of 500, Spades, or Bridge. Thus, just about any card game can be played with a set of Rook cards. Matt Carlson: My family heralds from the strongly church-going midwest so regular playing cards were “right out.” Rook is actually a set of cards 1-14 in four colors instead of suits with one unsuited Rook card. Proceeding chronologically, we get all the way up to 1949 today and through 1966 by the end of the week. This week we continue the series with ten more games, five today and five on Thursday. But if your timing is off by even a single turn, it could lose you the game.ĭominion is a modern classic game, and very much worth your time.Last week, The Opinionated Gamers launched a new series – 138 Games to Play Before You Die! The series began with Go, Sheepshead, Poker, Crokinole, and Pit. The game ends up as a supremely satisfying exercise in slowly building your deck into an efficient tool, so that you might snap up victory point cards all at once, near the end of the game.

The problem is, victory point cards (which for the most part do nothing aside from giving you game-winning points) dilute your deck. The core gameplay is simple: Each turn you can play an action and buy a card, be it an action card, a money card or a victory point card. And the granddaddy of these sorts of games is Dominion.ĭominion has been around for years, but its developer has kept it fresh with over a dozen expansions to the base game. Slowly, then, the hands they play with each turn transform to allow new strategies over the course of a game. Essentially, players draft or 'buy' cards in a deck-building game to shuffle into their draw decks. Deck building is a relatively recent development in card games.

Fun 2 people adult rook card games