by Pete Wissinger

My friend Pete Wissinger is a trick-taking maniac – a man obsessed. His collection of funky and rare trick-taking games (often from Asia) is a thing to behold, and for the past several years he's been working me through it. The design space is relatively tiny for these small-box games, but I'm perpetually amazed by how small design changes can dramatically impact the feel and strategy of these games.

Taiki Shinzawa is the master of these little tweaks, and No Loose Ends is a marvelous example. Many trick-taking games (including my first love, Wizard) often center on bidding – that is, predicting the number of tricks you will win. Shinzawa deepens this prediction, asking players to assess not just how many tricks but also the specific ways they will win! When Pete showed me Shut the Books, the game from which No Loose Ends was born, I was blown away and completely hooked. With his depth of knowledge, I asked Pete to help develop the game with me and also to share this developer diary with all of you. —Paul Salomon, creative director at GameHead

An Ode to Bidding

I love bidding in trick-taking games. I grew up playing Spades and Euchre, so I'm always excited to see how new games ask players to evaluate a hand and make predictions before a single card is played. The game before the game!

Pulling off a successful bid in a trick-taking game feels like such an accomplishment. You point out to everyone exactly what you plan to do, like Babe Ruth taking the plate before a big swing. The tactical maneuvering required to work toward your stated goal is exciting, and a good design gives you the tools to pull the rug out from your opponents through careful play.

Modern trick-takers are always looking for a new way to spin this old mechanism into something that feels fresh to seasoned players. The novelty of small box card games keeps the sickos like me coming back for more every time a new title promises to show something nobody has ever seen before in the well-worn genre. Can you teach an old dog new tricks?

Bidding, ultimately, is not beginner friendly and can lead to a lot of "feel bad" moments for people who aren't experienced with these games. That said, bidding rewards strategic thinking and makes it so there's no such thing as a "good" or "bad" hand in a trick-taker. The most successful games in the current trick-taking renaissance are the ones that welcome new players, while also providing a deep experience for the die-hards.


Taiki Shinzawa is a master of asking players to make seemingly impossible bids in trick-taking games. In luz, you don't know the values of your own hand of cards. In Ghosts of Christmas, you have to play into three tricks at once. In Charms, you have an uneven number of separate suit and number cards. In 9 Lives, you're never sure when the hand will end. In Twinkle Starship, you can shift your bid as you play if you're careful.

In Shinzawa games, hitting your bid can feel like a magic trick because the odds are so stacked against you. It's such a satisfying feat to pull it off!

Opening the Books

I played Shut the Books shortly after its debut at Tokyo Game Market in early 2024. I was already a big fan of Taiki Shinzawa, so I knew that this game was guaranteed to be at least interesting, even if not exactly fun on a first play. Sometimes his games are so strange that they can be opaque initially, and the scoring is often extremely unforgiving. They tend to grow on you once you wrap your head around the puzzle.

At its heart, Shut the Books is a standard "must follow" trick-taking game with a trump suit. You must play a card of the lead suit, etc., with nothing out of the ordinary in the cardplay or the deck make-up. It can be tough for a game like this to stand out in the current trick-taking market, but the magic of the game comes from its bidding system, which is one of the most satisfying iterations that I've ever seen.

I was immediately smitten with Shut the Books because its core twist was simple and intuitive, but opened up many interesting decisions for players. I'd played other games in which you have to bid with cards from your hand, but Shut the Books did it in an elegant way with layers of considerations for players to wrestle with in the planning and execution.

The first twist: You start a round of Shut the Books by laying down cards from your hand, each representing a trick you intend to win. The second twist: When you win a trick, you cover up one of your bid cards if the card you played matches the number or suit of one of your bid cards. (Trumping off suit adds some flexibility, allowing you to cover the suit you trumped over.) Any tricks you win that don't cover a bid are bad, as are uncovered bid cards at the end of the hand.

Image: Ashley
This system is cool because it allows players to manipulate their hand in interesting ways. You can short yourself of a suit by bidding with those cards, keep extra cards for added flexibility, and count cards more easily by seeing what others use in their bids. Of course, you're also giving your opponents a ton of information about how you intend to play.

This system is subtle, but has a boatload of decision space implications, which means that the game is super easy to teach and play, but to play it well requires exceptional cleverness. Because your bidding plans were laid bare in front of you, other players have more agency to throw a wrench in there and ruin everything. The game gives you the feeling of going right up to the edge of a cliff and making a hard stop while everyone else tries to push you off.

Planning the Heist

Unfortunately it was impossible to get a copy of this game after TGM. When my buddy Paul Salomon was looking for small box games that he could publish at GameHead, I told him to see whether he could get Shut the Books. I knew Paul was a fan of trick-taking games because we played them together constantly and helped playtest each others' designs. He immediately saw the potential and had excellent plays of it with a mix of casual and expert trick-taking folks. The bidding puzzle is just so good!

Paul tasked me with trying to make this brilliant game a bit more expressive and accessible. First on the list: a retheme. The theme was a bit vague in Shut the Books. Closing magic books that you recklessly opened is a bit abstract and not terribly immersive. Since the main objective of the game is to cover up the cards in your bid, I felt like planning a heist fit perfectly! The bid represents a plan, and the suits represent types of evidence one would leave behind. If you don't cover up a bid, the evidence is left face up, which means that you left a loose end and weren't careful. You should have covered up those fingerprints! Reverse engineering this game into a theme-forward design helped to clarify all of our remaining development decisions.

First prototype for this edition
The second thing Paul and I felt needed a touch up was the scoring. The incentive scheme is so important to a trick-taking game's magic. While not as brutal as the bidding in something like Ghosts of Christmas, the scoring in Shut the Books felt a bit flat and punishing.

Precision in bidding is obviously the goal of the game, but I thought the bidding system had the potential to add extra spice with the right incentives. Also, there was something slightly unintuitive to the Shut the Books scoring that felt at odds with the buttery smoothness of the gameplay. The Shinzawa scoring system is in the rulebook as a variant for purists, but I think we cooked up something extra juicy for the re-implementation.

First, since the bidding can be tricky for beginners, we wanted to soften things so that folks were less likely to end up with negative scores on their first hand. (We also wanted to include scoring tokens that represented loot, and negative loot wasn't going to be as thematic.) I proposed a simple system that still rewarded the most precise bidder, but also pushed players to bid aggressively. Each covered bid card would be worth two points, while each loose end would subtract one. The 5-point "perfect crime" bonus was added to make sure that an accurate prediction, no matter the number of tricks, would still get a big boost.

In addition, bidding "nil" in this game is exciting and thematically funny for a heist game. However, with our new scoring scheme, bidding zero didn't really work since we gave points for each covered bid. Making a zero bidder the "snitch" was fun and created an adversarial relationship between that player and the rest of the table. The other players need to feed a trick to the snitch, as otherwise their loose ends would be extra punishing and nobody would get the perfect crime bonus. The snitch mechanism amps up the intensity and makes the game even more interactive.

Tying Up Loose Ends

The new theme and scoring added a lot of drama to this already brilliant game. Come-from-behind gambits were possible, players needed to push their luck when bidding, and everything worked well with the theme — yet Paul wanted to add more tweaks to make the game even more accessible to new players, something he has a lot of experience with in his previous projects. The game itself was easy to learn, but the onboarding process needed to be a lot smoother.


His two main additions that helped make the game easier to pick up were changing the bid sequence and adding optional "getaway" cards. In Shut the Books, a player had to place their entire bid down at once, one player at a time. This led to a lot of downtime, especially if any player at the table had analysis paralysis. The new "gradual bidding" system helped things whip around the table and also allowed players to use the information they learned from others' bids to decide where to make risky gambits. I see this change of Paul's as a straight improvement for the bidding structure that is the core of what makes this game so great.

The getaway cards were something Paul and I went back and forth on. I enjoy a lot of trick-takers that have "pass" cards, such as Boast or Nothing or Skull King. Personally, I felt like they made bidding too easy for my tastes in No Loose Ends. I liked how tough the game was, how much it made the brain burn. Paul felt like the getaway cards helped with bidding for new players and also added more unpredictability and spice to the card play. In the end, he was right! Playtesters loved them, and these cards are easy to take out if people didn't want them there.

We also expanded the player count from 3-4 players to 2-5. The core game works well at those counts with a few adjustments to the deck make-up and hand size. Playing at two is a cutthroat experience and almost feels like a training mode to hone your bidding skills. Five is more of a zany romp, guaranteed to have some snitches in the mix. Both feel different from Shinzawa's narrow three- to four-player count in the original game, but are still fun experiences that make the game even easier to get to the table.

Image: Chris Yi
The game honestly didn't need much in the way of development, and the core gameplay is almost untouched. What we did here was take a great game and widen its audience. I think anyone curious about the trick-taking renaissance owes it to themselves to add No Loose Ends to their collection.

Also, this game is the first collaboration between Shinzawa and the legendary card game artist Sai Beppu! Working with Paul on the game was so much fun, and I feel privileged to have been given the opportunity to have a hand in this game. I've learned much about design and development from him. Ultimately though, I'm just happy my friend published this so that I could finally add another genius Shinzawa creation to my own card game collection!

Pete Wissinger

From Paul: Working on this game with my buddy Pete was a tremendous pleasure. Pete's thematic development and Sai Beppu's art brought an incredible design by Taiki Shinzawa to a new level. I am thrilled with the result, and I can't wait to share it with all of you!