by Pete Wissinger

Taiki Shinzawa: The Master of Modern Trick-Taking
Scholars debate when exactly the modern “trick-taking renaissance” started, but it is undeniable that one designer has proven to be the movement’s inventive da Vinci: Taiki Shinzawa.

A prolific genius, Shinzawa has been churning out weird and wonderful card games for over a decade. Many of these games were printed in small batches to be sold at Tokyo Game Market, making them the whispered subjects of treasure hunts for many Western gamers starting to explore the trick-taking wilderness.

Playing a Shinzawa game for the first time is like encountering something from an alternate dimension. He takes the normal conventions of trick-taking and rebuilds them into something alien. His games are puzzling and playful, asking players to be precise in their hand management, but with completely alien tools to do so.

The first Shinzawa games I played were the first ones to get wide releases in the US: Ghosts of Christmas and 9 Lives. Both of these titles are bidding trick-takers, something I grew up playing through Spades and Euchre. These two games, though, pushed me into new territory in a way that was incredibly exciting. Ghosts of Christmas asked me to bid on how many tricks I would win, but then three tricks were available for me to play into at the same time! In 9 Lives I could see what suits players were holding and the hand has an unknown number of tricks, with cards going back into players’ hands throughout the round.

As I continued exploring Taiki Shinzawa’s catalog, I found that there were a few common hallmarks in many of his designs. One of the big ones was that scoring was often very brutal. In American Bookshop, a game where players are attempting to collect only suits of cards in tricks that they could capture the majority of. Any suits where you are not the majority holder? Negative points. Also in his bidding games, players often earn zero points if they don’t hit their bid exactly. The fact that these very opaque games were also so unforgiving is great for a player like me who enjoys the struggle of a difficult game. It feels incredible to pull off a risky gambit in these games. The highs are high, but the lows are also devastating.

Trick-Taking Twist: Bid as You Go
There is a reason bidding is so satisfying in these card games. Looking at the hand of cards dealt to you and making a plan for how you intend to play it is a way to smooth out the difference between a “good” hand and a “bad” one. Winning the most or fewest tricks isn’t necessarily the goal: you set your own goal. How well do you understand the game? Can you make plans that include tactical maneuvers if things go sideways? Hitting your bid requires skill that is difficult to master, creating a satisfying and delicious struggle that continues to be rewarding even after playing a game dozens (or hundreds) of times. There is a reason Bridge is a lifestyle game for so many people!

While precise bidding is a common feature in trick-taking games, it makes them difficult for new players to pick up. It’s intimidating! Before I’ve actually played a round, you’re asking me to predict how it will all go down? And if I’m wrong I don’t score? With so many players only giving a game one or two plays to make a good first impression, this can be a lot for folks who didn’t grow up playing classic card games.

Bidding, though, doesn’t have to always take place before the cardplay begins. Many modern trick-takers have systems that allow for a shifting or evolving bid, giving players the chance to narrow down on a target as the cards play out. For example, in Nokosu Dice, players draft a set of dice that are used as cards in tricks, but the last unplayed die in your supply is your bid. This means that through clever management of your resources, you can wait until the last possible moment to decide on what that magic number will be. In BiD Coin, you have a set of bid cards you are trying to spend before your opponents. Players start each hand bidding zero, but every time a trick pushes you above your current target, you must increase your bid. In Xylotar, players cannot see their hand of cards so knowing how many tricks will be won is impossible. However, at some point in the hand, once they have deduced their remaining numbers through tricks, a player will declare that one of those face down cards is their bid and then reveal it, hoping their deductions have been accurate.

These are just two examples that show how modern trick-taking designers have started to play with the idea that a bid does not need to be declared before the first trick is played. This creates a unique puzzle that can be just as exciting to solve as the long established norms. Giving players some sort of resource to steer towards a bid creates a dynamic arc to each round. In my mind, no game has pulled off this “bid as you go” concept better than Taiki Shinzawa’s Segment Trix.

The Genius of Segment Trix

Segment Trix was a game that I saw pictures of when I started my modern trick-taking obsession, and I couldn’t believe how novel the component hook was. Cards were made up of seven segment numbers like you’d see on a digital clock. There’s sort of a magic to how subtracting segments from that boxy “8” creates a legible shape for every number! This game is so playful in its use of those numerals.

The cards in Segment Trix looked like those digital clock numbers, but players were given a special resource: wooden segments. These little pieces could be added to a card to change its printed value! For example, with one extra segment on top, a 1 could become a 7. One in the middle could turn a 0 into an 8. This was already getting me excited before I learned what the REAL hook here was: the number of unused segments in a player’s supply at the end of a hand… is their bid of how many tricks they need to have won!

Unfortunately it was impossible to find a copy of Segment Trix for a long time until it was re-released as Twinkle Starship in a small print run. I grabbed a copy and was excited to see if it lived up to the legendary hype that had been building in this tiny corner of the hobby.

The gameplay turned out to be brilliant because of the flexible bidding system. This might seem easy enough at first. Couldn’t you just use enough sticks on the last trick to hit your bid? Naturally, it’s not that easy. For example, if a player is on the final trick, has two segments remaining, and has won one trick so far, shouldn’t it be easy to just drop a segment on that final card? Not if that last card is a 4, which cannot make a legal number with one segment. Or an 8 which cannot use any segments. Also be careful not to accidentally win that trick you’re trying to dump a segment into!

The hand of cards and stock of segments work together to break your brain when you first get into it, but the game is not intimidating. It’s fun to change the numbers on cards! It is a thinky game that also manages to be sort of silly because players have such a high amount of agency to do strange things when playing into a trick. This is not a careful card counting game, but it also isn’t a totally random and chaotic experience either. There’s nothing quite like it and it lives up to the promise of that component hook.

Taking the Time
After the success of No Loose Ends, Paul Salomon from GameHead was eager to find the next Shinzawa game that deserved its time in the spotlight. I told him that the one I thought never got its fair shake but had mass appeal was Twinkle Starship. We played it together and he was immediately enthusiastic about publishing it. The game is just so immediately exciting. It may have seemed too niche when it was first released in Japan in 2020, but the greater hobby market was now ready for a trick-taker that was this innovative.

Like with No Loose Ends, the core gameplay didn’t need much in the way of major changes, so our first important task was to try to find an appropriate theme for the game. With No Loose Ends, we were able to reverse engineer Shut the Books into a theme-forward design that actually reinforced the mechanisms for the game. Twinkle Starship and Segment Trix were themeless in their presentation and lacked a strong identity that paired well with that rock-solid gameplay.

Going with something time related seemed correct since the digital numbers immediately reminds one of a clock. Manipulating clock numbers made me think of time travel. Sometimes the most obvious connection can really make a game sing. The little rods that change the numbers of the clock can represent fuel for the time machine. It was easy to imagine how a stellar production could bring this story to life and the time travel theme ended up informing all of the development decision we made for the game.

Segment Trix had impeccable trick-play and bidding so that didn’t need to change for Trick to the Future. The only areas that were lacking were the very harsh scoring and the inflexible player count.

This was the first themed prototype design from Paul Salomon
Going Beyond
Scoring in Segment Trix was simple: if you hit your final bid, you score two points per trick and one point per segment captured from cards in tricks. A player who did not win tricks equal to their remaining segments scored zero points. Ouch. If a player won zero tricks they scored ten points, but only if they could get rid of all of their segments.. A lot of great incentives were baked into this system. Using segments made a trick more valuable, it was important to be precise with your resources. However, the game was so odd to get the hang of that getting no points for being off by even a single trick seemed unreasonable for new players and could easily lead to a runaway leader, making people less likely to want to play more hands if they made even a small mistake.

Because of the time travel theme and the rods representing fuel for mad science, we changed the scoring to be a bit more forgiving but spicy in its own way. If using fuel segments in tricks represents your time machine operating, then using too little fuel wouldn’t be a big problem. You need enough fuel to return to your normal time. However, running out of fuel while time traveling would be a huge issue. This lended itself to incorporating a busting mechanism into the game. Winning too many tricks means you’re lost in time, winning too few is ok… but you could have traveled in time more!

What this means mechanically is that you get those points for tricks and segments like in the original game so long as you didn’t win more tricks than your remaining segments. However, using your fuel exactly right would double points so being precise was still important. This turns the bid into almost more of a push your luck mechanism. Since players have so much control early in the hand to win or lose tricks with fuel rods, it creates a feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff if you don’t play it safe.

Here are some concept sketches for the player boards used to track fuel rods
Paul and I went back and forth for a long time on how to incorporate the “nil” bid into this scoring system. The flat point value from the original game wouldn’t quite work here since we were dealing with numbers that could be doubled. Giving up all your fuel rods is such an interesting strategy because ultimately you are feeding point into trick that other players will be taking. The reward needs to make up for this to make it worth it to avoid all that potential doubling. A good shoot the moon zero bid mechanism needs to be more enticing to players than winning exactly one or two. It should be worth the risk to dodge the easy tricks. We landed on making the reward scale with the potential points you’re giving up. If a player wins no tricks, they score 3 points for each empty fuel space on their player board.. This was easy to internalize, thematic, and still rewarded zero trick players who didn’t manage to get rid of all their rods. It also scaled nicely with different player counts.

The Final Journey
As for playing the game beyond the original 3-4 player count, we had to run some experiments. It is common for tick-taking games to only list the option to play a game with a number of players that would give a similar, even experience. The main consideration tends to be the number of tricks that would be available per person or how the deck would need to be manipulated.

When Paul and I tested the game with five players, we found that all the core mechanisms worked, it was just a bit of a zanier experience. Scores could diverge wildly, but the bidding and segment play were still fun. By adjusting the number of segments each player received, the game totally worked as a bigger, swingier experience. While some players may not prefer this, it was a riot when we tested it with large groups.

As for the two-player experience, this turned out to be surprisingly satisfying. A key development was removing the trump suit at two players. This made bidding even more precarious, adding extra uncertainty. Because of the shifting bid system, this turned into a cutthroat game of trying to push your opponent over the edge by feeding them tricks they couldn’t handle. A dueling card game atmosphere emerged and players could be hyper attuned to their opponent’s bid in a way that lost very little of the game’s core promise.

Trick to the Future gives Taiki Shinzawa’s masterpiece the treatment it deserves. The thematic production is out of this world and has tons of meaningful quality of life enhancements. This includes dual-layer player boards for fuel that help track the new nil bid and keep your supply separate from those won in tricks. There is also player aid on every card as to what numbers the rank could be transformed into with rods. I’m thankful that Paul brought me back on to develop this one after No Loose Ends because these two games are the pinnacle of what the modern trick-taking renaissance represents for me. This isn’t just rehashing the same old thing. These show that there is brilliance to be found in iterative game design. Taking apart a well trodden system and putting the pieces back together into some sort of wonderful new creation that can take you from the past to the future.