by Kristian Amundsen Østby

Kjetil: Hi, Kristian, could you write a designer diary for our game Tax the Rich?

Kristian: Yes, I can do that!

Kjetil: Remember not to mention politics on BGG!

Kristian: Uhm, sure!

•••
Norway in the 1980s — there was one card game everyone knew: Amerikaner. Its title translates to "American", and this was the go-to trick-taking game that you could play with everyone. You played it at school between classes or with your family on holiday.

This may not have been entirely true, but this is how I remember it.

Years later, my grandfather taught me Bridge. He had been an active competitive player for many years, and for some reason "American", which is known elsewhere as "Spades", was considered a simple family game, whereas Bridge held a higher status and was considered a proper game for adults.

I now believe this discrepancy to be quite snobbish, although I do appreciate how much a different bidding system can do for a trick-taking game. In "American", you simply bid for how many tricks you believe you can win, then the winner of the bid decides the trump color. In Bridge, the trump color is determined by the bidding. For example, a bid in Bridge can be "eight tricks with spades as trump", which can be topped by "nine tricks with diamonds as trump". This adds a new layer to the game as you get information about the strengths of the other players' hands.

In 2017, I made a trick-taking game called Rebel Nox together with Helge Meissner and Anna Wermlund. (We have also co-designed 2025's Recall with Kjetil.) We explored a lot of new ideas, and that design combined trick-taking, secret roles, and team manipulation. One problem with the game was that the possible strategies were quite subtle. For new players in particular, the team manipulation could seem quite chaotic – and the outcome would feel random. It simply wasn't a good game for new players.

Learning from this, two years ago I started designing Tax the Rich. I wanted to make a game that was solid and varied enough to be played by anyone who likes trick-taking games – hopefully for years — and I started building the game around the bidding system of Bridge.

The added information you get from the bidding in Bridge is great, but the bidding is often brief since the first bid must be for at least seven tricks (which is called "a bid of 1" in Bridge). In Tax the Rich, I introduced a bidding board, which makes the bidding process more visual: You place a marker to show your bid and the trump color. The next player can improve the bid by either choosing a bid space to the right (which changes the trump color) or moving to the row above (which increases the number of tricks). This system ensures the bidding phase doesn't end too quickly and allows players to exchange a proper amount of information about their hands. Sometimes you bid because you want to win the bid, sometimes you bid just to avoid a particular trump color.

Many trick-taking games have been released recently, and many have introduced new, interesting twists. I invited Kjetil Svendsen to participate in the design of Tax the Rich as he is a huge fan of the genre.

In standard trick-taking games, you can thoughtlessly play your weakest cards when you know you cannot win a trick. It was important for us to make the player's choice in such situations less obvious. We came up with a rule inspired by another popular card game from the 1980s called "Pig" (similar to Spoons). If – at any time – you have only cards with low values in hand, you can announce this and switch the hierarchy of the cards for the rest of this round. Suddenly, the lowest cards become the most powerful.

What does such a mechanism resemble? A social revolution against the capitalist economy, of course!

And as in real life, pulling off a social revolution against the capitalistic system is not so easy to achieve because you are sometimes forced to play a card you didn't plan to. (As with capitalism itself, Tax the Rich is a "must-follow" game.) Also, when you announce a revolution, you must play the rest of the round with your cards face up on the table, visible to all. (This is similar to Bridge, by the way.)

And there we had our theme.

And now it becomes hard to avoid mentioning politics.

American culture has always had a big impact on our lives in Norway, ever since we watched American cartoons on the TV in the 1980s. As you've already seen, even our card games were called "American". American politics has also always felt somehow relevant for our lives — and for the past years we have been growing increasingly concerned.

The political situation in the U.S. has made it clear what polarization can do to society and how our entire civilization relies on a principled, free press to convey an honest and accurate description of the real world. When we do not agree on how the world works, it is impossible to agree on proper solutions. When world leaders start ignoring – or even actively opposing – the free press, all while antagonizing minorities, things look dark.

And things have gotten worse since we began developing this game.

All of this is much too extensive and serious to capture in a board game. We do not make any attempt at fully covering this dark matter. But the issue is hard to avoid entirely, and we therefore make a light attempt with a game that includes some satirical elements.

For example, we named all the cards after their ranks in the social capitalistic hierarchy: the poor on the bottom, the president on the top. In between you have everything from teachers and doctors to influencers and billionaires.

After all, billionaires also have their place in the social hierarchy, right behind the president. Elon Musk spent an estimated US$277 million to get U.S. President Donald Trump elected, which is of course a huge democratic problem clearly illustrating how far from the ideal of "one man, one vote" the American democracy has come. In this game, the Billionaire has the effect "Power Grab", which gives him (which is the proper pronoun for most billionaires) strong powers over who wins the trick – even though it can backfire...

Kjetil: Kristian! Enough with the politics! This is getting out of hand. You know people will rage in the comments section!

Okay, okay, back to the gameplay.

We struggled with two things during the design. At first (and for a long time), we wanted the teams to be secret. The winner of the bid would announce a card, and whoever held this card would be their teammate, with this relationship remaining secret until the card was played.

This was a perfect example of a "kill your darlings" game design situation. Guessing who your teammate was was meant to be exciting, but not knowing your teammate meant the first tricks were played in the dark. In practice, this made players care less about who won the early tricks. Changing to open teams made players care from the first trick. (This change was a relief for test players, but the game can still be played with secret teams as a variant.)

Our second struggle was that we wanted the game to work with up to six players — but with six players, you have only ten cards in hand, so each player can expect to win only 1-2 tricks. Even with teams, this is not enough to keep players excited. The breakthrough came when we realized we could let both the strongest card and the second strongest card win a trick. (They each collect three cards as their trick.) Suddenly we were on par with the expected number of tricks won by each player in a standard game of Bridge.

We wanted our game to feel unique every time you play. Just like the bidding system can have a huge impact on the game, subtle changes to the rules can heavily influence how you think and feel in a trick-taking game. We therefore introduced the rule cards.

For each character in the game, we made a thematically and mechanically fitting (?) rule card that would change how you play. After each round, you introduce one additional rule card, so in the third and final round, there will be three active rule cards – which means three of the characters on the cards have special abilities. The combination of active rule cards is meant to heavily influence how you play, and only three (of thirteen) are used each game, so there is a lot of variation. We took time to find and adjust effects that have real impact, while still being streamlined and easy to grasp. We made sure the effects matched their character thematically. This may seem like a restriction, but in fact, the theme made it quite easy to come up with effects.

For example, the rule card for the police is called "Stop & Frisk" and lets the player take a card from another player's hand. The doctor's ability is called "Vaccination Time", and the scientist's effect is called "Debunked".

We also suggest scenarios in the rules in which you play with a given combination of rule cards. One scenario uses the scientist and the doctor and is called "Vax on, vax off"—

Kjetil: This is really not the place...

Anyway. In addition to the rule cards, two special effects are always active:

Leading with the highest card is an automatic play in many trick-taking games, but we introduced a rule to make it just a little bit harder for the same player to keep a trick-winning streak. The highest card, the President, has the ability "Incompetent Leader", meaning you cannot lead a trick with this card, and—

Kjetil: ...

Oh, and I almost forgot to explain the title of the game: If you win a trick with "The Poor", you can "Tax the Rich" and steal one trick from the player with the most tricks. As we emphasize in the rules, the term "steal" is used only for rules clarity; in real life, taxation and redistribution of wealth is encouraged as a fun and healthy activity for all.

Did you know the wealthiest three families in the U.S. own more than the bottom half of the population? Not only does this give them political power, it also means that members of these families can pollute more and consume more of our common natural resources, and as we all trade in the same markets, the size of people's wealth is not just a private matter—

Kjetil: I think that does it. Let's wrap things up.

Kristian: But I haven't even mentioned how you can start a feminist revolution!?

Kjetil: I am sure the readers will manage. Bye!