Three great trick-taking games from 2026

Ah, hello! It’s been a few weeks, a fact I can attribute to late summer travel, both for work and for family, and because it’s a bit chaotic having a three-year-old running around. He’s delightful, and he does always want to play games, and he’s very funny — but it just doesn’t always lead to writing at the end of the night. I keep telling myself that I ought to wake up earlier, since I do think I do better writing in the morning, but we’ll see if I ever get there.

This week, I’d like to go over some of the interesting trick-taking games that have been released this year.

The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth (Sing) is the third installment in the series, and it goes in some directions I didn’t quite expect. Games are now intentionally more than one hand, and you’ll be trying to complete generally one task at a time for that hand. It’s an interesting twist, and there are a ton of different tasks for the taking. You might take an easy one worth fewer points or a harder one worth more. Tasks worth more points help you move along a time track faster than those worth fewer.

As a result, the game feels quite a bit different. What once was a one-hand, many-tasks game becomes a many-hand, many-tasks game. The tasks are adjusted such that it’s not just straightforward at higher point counts, but increasingly, this game felt like a derivation from The Crew: Mission Deep Sea (2021) and less like one from the original 2019 release.

I’ve got to play this a bit more before I can comfortably judge, especially because the game does get more difficult over time, as you’d expect. Still, the differences are clear, and I think it’ll take me a bit to get used to them.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers — Trick-Taking Game (Bornmueller) is the same well-loved system from the first entrant in the trilogy, but it extends and expands in key mechanical ways. You can absolutely step in after finishing the first without a steep learning curve. And it succeeds in just the ways the first does, with elements of the story coming through in gameplay. While I’m not terribly worried about spoiling the book, I do think there’s some real excitement in seeing the mechanisms unfold.

We’re still working our way through this one with our friends, and I think it’s fair to say that the game gets a bit hairy, often in ways that its predecessor didn’t. That’s a reasonable thing, given the progression of the story. At some point I’ll discuss this one at more length.

Shards of Creation (Dillard) is a game set in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere, the series of novels, novellas and short stories. It adapts concepts more than specific stories, and in so doing, it actually makes a nice trick-taking game. You’ll be playing with eight ‘shards’ (thanks to Ginny’s cousin for a real crash course in the Cosmere and these shards), which I honestly do not know how to explain, as I’ve not read the books.

The game’s not too difficult to pick up: It’s a must-follow game, and you’ll take a card from the trick if you win it. The deck’s actually quite big, which becomes wholly necessary given you’ll keep the cards you collect across rounds, and you’ll only score at the end of the game. There are on-card abilities, special suit abilities, and uneven ranks within suits. I understand there are deeply thematic reasons for these, but again, I’ve not read the books. Playing with a dedicated fan of Sanderson’s work gave me an excellent grounding to understand the decisions, but honestly, I didn’t need to in order to join the game. This is just a solid trick-taker, and the theme comes through even if you aren’t hyper-familiar with the books.

I’ll be back soon with more games I’ve been thinking about. I played Jibber Jabble (Sikes, 2026) with my parents, my brother and his fiance, and my wife (and our three-year-old.) It’s a great little cooperative party game where you’re spelling (or misspelling, often intentionally) a word by each person calling out the next letter in a clue, and one person is trying to figure out a card based on three clues. Except, well, you aren’t coordinating on the letters you’re shouting out, and you absolutely are going to fail in the funniest ways.

A bit shorter this week, but I realize that waiting until I've got over 2,000 words written means I'll just never get these newsletters out. So, here's hoping I've got something for you next week, too.