by W. Eric Martin

▪️ I've already covered two Norwegian releases for SPIEL Essen 25, so let's move on to a third, this time from Vegard Eliassen Stillerud, Eilif Svensson, and Åsmund Svensson, with the latter two being owners of publisher Chilifox Games.

Movie Tricks is being pitched as a trick-taking game (even in its title), but gameplay is more akin to Kalle Malmioja's 2016 card game Honshū. Each player plays a card to the table each round — following suit, if possible, or possibly trumping the lead card — then players draft a card from the market based on the strength of the card they played, placing that market card on their tableau. The market is initially seeded with as many cards as players, then the played cards in a trick become the market for the next round.

Whoever plays the lowest-valued card (or the two such cards in a five-player game) draft one of two bonus cards, allowing them to change the trump suit, with the drafted card typically going in their hand or in their tableau.

Cards come in four types — CGI, props, roles, and soundtrack — and you place a card in your tableau in the matching category, with all placed cards being visible and with a row of four cards effectively creating a movie title, such as "The Cursed Mission: Unseen City", thanks to the card's name. Whenever you take a props card, you can decide to lock in a props scoring card based on the number of different props you have in your tableau.

At game's end, you score for your most high-valued movie, your lowest-valued card type, and for the four card types, each of which scores a different way.

▪️ A somewhat more traditional trick-taking game is Alebrijes, a 3-5 player game from Joel Escalante, Rafael Escalante, and Fractal Juegos.

Your goal each round is to ditch your hand first. Cards come in four suits numbered 1-5, with a fifth wild suit in those values.

The lead player of a trick plays one or more cards, with a multi-card play needing to share both number and color. Each other player in turn has one chance to beat the highest play currently on the table — but to beat a play, you need to play either the same number of cards of the same color with a higher number or the same number of cards of the next higher color value. (The colors go from blue (low), to green, pink, and orange, with blue beating orange if you have one more blue card than the number of orange cards played, e.g., three blue 2s beat two orange 5s.)

After receiving your starting hand, you can discard up to two cards, then draw to refill your hand — and whenever you pass in a trick instead of playing, you have the same option to discard up to two cards, then draw that many.

Some cards feature an Ollin symbol, and whenever you play a single card with this symbol, each other player must draw a card and add it to their hand. If you play a pair with at least one Ollin, you can do this same effect or you can discard a card from your hand.
When a player empties their hand, each other player scores points equal to the highest number of each color they hold (with wild being a fifth color here). After three rounds, whoever has the lowest score wins.

▪️ Daniel Newman from New Mill Industries debuted a new trick-taking game at Game Market in mid-May 2025, and now the 3-4 player game Woodlanders is also available from the New Mill website.

Your goal in each of three rounds is to score more points than others. The card deck has fifty cards in five suits, with cards numbered 1-4 in each suit, with four 1s, three 2s, two 3s, and a lone 4. After looking at your hand, in counterclockwise order each player chooses a pain suit from those unclaimed; collect cards in this suit, and you lose points. The dealer in a four-player game chooses pain from the final two suits, with the remaining suit being trump.

In a trick, a player leads with 1-2 cards of the same suit (although a 4 must be played alone), then each player follows suit if possible. The highest sum played in the trump suit wins the trick, with the highest sum in the led suit winning otherwise. Ties are broken in favor of the latter player. If the trick contains no cards of the winner's pain suit, then they collect all of the cards, scoring +1 for each. However, if the winner's pain suit is present, they collect only these cards, scoring -1 per card.

When two players have emptied their hand, the round ends, and whoever has the highest sum earns 3 points for the round, with the second- and third-highest sums winning 2 and 1 points. Whoever has the most points after three rounds wins. (For the three-player game, a robot player controls the fourth hand, playing based on an algorithm to take as many tricks as possible.)