The Fox in the Forest

Thin box, fifty-four cards, light enough that I’ve forgotten it was in the pack more than once and found it wedged behind the water filter at the bottom. That’s not a complaint, just an observation about how little room a trick-taking game needs when someone bothers to design one for two players instead of forcing four-player rules to work with three-card dummy hands, which is the usual solution and a bad one.

The deck runs one through eleven in three suits, foxes, birds, and a third I keep having to check the rulebook to remember is called something like the wandering fool. You’re each dealt thirteen cards, keep six, and play tricks trying to land your trick count on exactly three, not the most, not the fewest, exactly three. Go over or under and you score less than if you’d hit it. That target number sits in the middle of the whole design and it’s the reason the game doesn’t collapse into whoever holds the higher cards. I’ve held a hand stacked with elevens and still lost the round because I couldn’t stop winning tricks I didn’t want.

There’s a special card, the eleven of birds I believe, that lets you take a trick with a lower card instead if you choose, which adds a layer of bluffing to what would otherwise be a fairly mechanical exercise in counting cards and predicting your opponent’s hand. That card is doing more work than its rules text suggests. Most of my games have turned on whether I could remember it was in play and whether the person across from me had.

I’ve only played this two-player, which is the only way it’s built to be played, no solo variant included or promised. Games run quick, fifteen minutes once you know the suits, and it’s forgiving of interruption, easy to set a hand down mid-trick if the radio crackles with a check-in and pick it back up a minute later without losing the thread. The art is soft, watercolor foxes and owls in a forest that looks nothing like the burned-over slopes I actually watch from the tower, which I mention only because I noticed it every time I dealt the cards, a small contrast I never quite stopped registering.

My hesitation with this one is that it plays fine but doesn’t have much reach past three or four sessions with the same partner. Once you’ve learned to count the deck and track the special card, the tension flattens out faster than Onitama’s or Hive’s. Good for an evening with the trail-count ranger, not something I find myself asking for a second time in the same week the way I do with the smaller box games.