Who's a Good Boy?

For years now, cooperative trick-taking games have been a staple in my gaming group -- both versions of The Crew, and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game. But those games have loosened their grip a little in the past few months. The Gang has become our go-to cooperative card game. And now a new competitive game seems to be filling the trick-taking niche.

Vivo is played with a custom deck -- though not far from standard: 48 cards are divided into four suits with one card each numbered 1 through 12. (They're also adorned with illustrations of singing dogs, blending cuteness with the game's musical theme.) As usual, you deal out the deck evenly to all players to begin a round.

Then come the clever twists that make the game unique. There's also a small, shuffled side deck: multiple cards labeled "solo," "duet," "trio," or "quartet" that shift the rules of each trick played. (You see the current round's card, as well as the upcoming rule for the next round -- if you're growing skilled enough at the game to take advantage of that preview.) The rule card governs how you must "follow suit" for a trick, in the common parlance of trick-taking games. "Solo" is what card gamers will know well: only one suit can be played to the trick; one person leads, everyone else must follow if they can, and the highest card wins the trick.

The other three cards shake that up. In "duet," two different suits can be played. After one player leads the trick, the next player can choose to follow, or can introduce a second suit into the trick. Whichever player plays the highest card of the first two suits in the trick will win it (with ties going to the most recently played card). "Trio" allows three suits in the trick, while "quartet" effectively reverses the rules for four players: each player must not follow any suit already in the trick.

On top of this break from the familiar comes Vivo's intriguing method of scoring points. Winning a trick will net you 2 points: you take the card you won with and place it face down in front of you as a marker. But also, the lowest card in a trick scores too; its owner places that card face up in front of them, where it's worth face value. So while winning tricks is certainly good, the real path to victory is trying to sneak into tricks with the highest-numbered card you can that's still the lowest card in the trick. The same tiebreaking rule -- most recent card wins the tie -- makes for thrilling swings as a trick unfolds. And the fact that the low cards are scored face up is also informational; you may not be good enough at counting cards to know for certain what specific cards are still out there, but you can look around the table and see several that definitely aren't.

The clever intersection of the solo/duet/trio/quartet deck with the game's clever scoring make for one of my favorite kinds of games: easy to teach, yet satisfying to play. If you're explaining the game to someone familiar with Hearts, Spades, Bridge, or the like, you can be playing in only a minute or two. But just a few tricks in, you quickly realize that not every strategy you might bring from one of those games applies here, and you'd better develop some new ones.

I've played a fair number of new trick-taking games over the past couple years. They've all had their intriguing tweaks to the familiar, but for me none have satisfied as much as Vivo. And extra points to Vivo for doing it with simpler rules than many of the others. (I'm looking at you, Cat in the Box.) The game is still rising in my esteem each time I play it; right now, it feels like an A-. I can easily imagine wearing out the cards with excessive use... and then happily buying another copy for the group.