by Nate Smith, written in 2024 and originally posted on Board Game Geek as a thread in the Linko game page.
In 2000, Mark Thompson wrote a wonderful article Defining the Abstract in The Games Journal wherein he lays out a basic definition of abstract strategy games. He then proceeds to develop 4 characteristic elements he argues are qualities of an abstract strategy game with "lasting merit".
They are:
I feel as though traditional style card games have an identity that can be similarly atomized to first principles and propose to do that here, taking as a case study what I think is the best exemplar of this style in recent years, Abluxxen. It’s a game that feels both timeless and brand new.
What makes a card game a “traditional” style game? For starters, we should talk about the idea of “tradition” in gaming. The term calls to mind cultural and familial patterns, and indeed many of the games in this style are cultural lodestones around which families and communities form.
I’ve encountered this in my own game-playing experience in many varied contexts. When I was very young, my parents and a few other couples would inevitably play endless rounds of Hearts or Spades while we kids played outside or played video games whenever our families would get together on weekends. After my parents divorced, we spent a lot of time playing Mhing and Cribbage with my mom.
In my adolescence and young adulthood, I also encountered traditional card games and benefitted from the social lubricant they can serve as. Over a few summers of church youth trips, a counselor / chaperone taught a group of us Pedro which holds a very similar status in Cajun country as what Euchre holds in the American Midwest (and what other cultural equivalents hold in their own regions).
Pedro remained a part of my life for a long time while my wife and I were dating. My in-laws also played the game, and for years any time I was at their house we 4 would play round-robin tournaments, switching partners up until we’d each been paired. They kept a log in a notebook of team and individual wins which served as a source of bragging rights and a testament to the longevity of this dating relationship.
One of the joys of traditional card games played in this manner are the cultural and interpersonal connections they enable, as well as the in-jokes and shared experiences they engender. Knowing Pedro gave me a nice way to build a relationship with my eventual in-laws, and we formed new traditions and memories together over that game. When we are all together, a simple “is it time?” signals the desire to play.
We have also played lots of Canasta and Phase 10 with them, and these offer more examples of the kinds of shared memories these kind of games create. For us, Phase 10 is known only as “Skip Mama”, because it is an imperative if you want to win the game that you skip my mother-in-law (who is the card shark among us). My kids have started to learn the game and for them it is now known as “Skip Grammy”.
Traditional card games are a largely unexamined fundamental part in the lives of so many societies and families. And so I’d like to tell you a little more about these games and about Abluxxen, which is coming to serve as the card game of choice in my own family, or as we call it: “Three Fools”
A bit about the name, because its provenance won’t be obvious to anyone and because it provides a nice way to discuss one of what I think are the most important things to appreciate about traditional games. We play the game with my Badger Deck (which, aside, I can’t recommend highly enough to card gamers), using the Aces and all ten picture / face cards, from Castle to Wizard. Since there are no numbers, then, we rank the cards alphabetically. This makes the “F”-pipped Fools rather a weak card, beating only Aces and Castles, and therefore a common target of theft. At some point we must have laid down or stolen a “three fools” play often enough that the name stuck (the fools are also my kids’ favorite characters in the wonderfully illustrated deck, which certainly must have played a role).
Yes, that means that we play with 10 suits * 11 ranks rather than the 8 * 13 in the published game. We also play without any jokers. For many readers, this might make you think I’ve never actually played the game and therefore shouldn’t be reviewing it, but that take I think is at odds with the game’s style as a traditional card game and with how such games work. That is, with the whole purpose of this review. You will find as many versions of the “rules” of Spades as there are Spades players, none of these versions “wrong”. You will find people who play Euchre with additional ranks, people who play Cribbage with muggins, people who allow wild card melds in Canasta, and so on. There’s no telling why these variants exist or where they came from anymore than one could explain why some people use a roux for mac and cheese and some don’t.
As in cooking, there are certain variously clear and mostly uncrossable boundaries that define a game or a dish as one thing and not another (no tomatoes in gumbo, damnit) but only self-important blowhards or social-media influencers (ok, that’s the same thing) go off on someone for “doing it wrong”. There are traditional games with rulesets that vary less frequently / meaningfully across players, but within the variations that exist there is no “real Cribbage” any more than there is a “real carbonara” (sorry food snobs, although while we’re talking mac and cheese and carbonara and authenticity, if you’re at least as clever as this guy you do get a pass). What there is instead is a core set of procedures that define the essential structure of a thing and then a fuzziness around its edges.
So, you might play Three Fools like I do with the Badger Deck, you might play it with a published edition, or you might play it as it was almost certainly designed and playtested with just a double poker deck. Maybe you’ll do something different with the jokers than we do or the published rules do, or maybe you’ll change how stealing or drafting works in the game, or maybe you’ll impose some kind of limit on what players are allowed to play on their first meld or to go out, or maybe something else specific to you that no one else would have thought up. All of that is great, and all of that is part of the fundamental way that traditional games have developed over time that has led to their distinct longevity. I hope for everything that this is exactly what happens with Three Fools and that it enters the canon of traditional card games alongside other relative newbies like Canasta, Rummikub, Oh Hell, or even Tichu.
It’s that good, and in telling you why I hope to also draw out some of the ways in which it models all of what is best about these kinds of games.
Most other popular traditional style card games, new and old, in the hobby have a clear connection to some preexisting game or game family. This is, of course, how traditional card games tend to evolve, so it makes a lot of sense. You have Oh Hell!, then Wizard, then Skull King. You have Big Two, then Dou Dizhu and Zheng Fen, then Tichu, then Haggis. You have any number of games spinning off of the basic trick-taking-with-bids structure. Occasionally, however, something like Llama or Lost Cities or Hanabi comes along that shares the trappings of the ranks-and-suits kind of card game, but strays quite far from the well-trodden paths.
Three Fools is in the latter, rarer category and to me this makes it feel quite special given how well it pulls off something very new while providing comparable variety and nuance as that found in incrementally developed games that have had the benefit of selective evolution. If the game shares any of its core structure with prior art, I’m not sure I can identify it. It has elements of a climbing or “beating” game, but you never have to climb nor match an opponent’s played combination. It has elements of a “shedding” game, but the winner is often not the first one out and prioritizing going out can be a losing strategy.The basic gameplay loop could not be more simple, and I think might actually approach a sort of asymptotic theoretical minimum for rule complexity in a card game. On your turn, you play any number of cards from your hand that share a rank in a score pile in front of you. Whenever someone plays their last card, scores are counted: +1 point per card you played -1 point per card you’re still holding. High score wins. And that’s it, that’s the basic game in its entirety. Of course, that game would not be interesting to play for anyone except children or great dullards, as the player holding the most matched cards would always win.
And so, of course, there must be some wrinkle to consider, and that wrinkle is the steal / “snatch” / “abluxx” action. Whenever you play a set of cards that is both equal in size/count and higher in rank than the set(s) on top of any other player(s)’ stacks, you attack those players and they lose those cards. You have the choice to steal them for yourself, placing them into your hand (thus putting you further from going out in exchange for a possible larger meld later). If you decline, the opposing player must choose either to take the cards back into their own hand (effectively a lose-a-turn) or to have them discarded. If either you steal the cards or they’re discarded, the opponent has to draw an equal number of cards as those they lost. A secondary wrinkle is how cards are drawn—namely, that they are taken from a face-up display of 6 cards in the center of the table. This has a funny effect of making it often desirable to have your cards stolen or discarded, since you can pick and choose what you like from the table to match what you have in hand, trying to build up ever larger sets of ever higher cards so that your future plays can be more easily defended or be more lethal to opponents. This open draft along with the ability to scoop up cards from your opponents’ stacks gives the game a fluidly dynamic feel and satisfyingly rich texture, with all kinds of unintuitive consequences and space for players to express their own personal play styles—conservative, daring, or in-between.The game proceeds a bit like that fencing scene from The Princess Bride, with small testing steps made at first as each player feels out the landscape and the other players’ positions, then develops quickly through the midgame as momentum swings back and forth and strength is stacked against strength, then crescendos to a sudden denouement wherein the game reveals whose moves were timed right for the moment at hand and who is left spent with little to show for it. The game is more like a dance than anything, with a wonderful (literal) give and take that is just pleasant to be part of, whichever side you are on. The game is overtly in-your-face interactive, but almost wholly without opportunity for spite or feel-bad take-that.
That’s the game, and for anyone who enjoys traditional card games of any persuasion I give it the most wholehearted of recommendations. I think it is quite possibly the best “whole cloth” (not “trick-taking with a twist”) traditional style card game in the hobby.
The features that, to me, most distinguish traditional style card games from "modern" card games or from other kinds of games altogether are, like Thompson's abstract strategy signposts, not mechanisms but something more like a mood or a gestalt. They're characteristics of how it feels to play the game.
In the best trad card games, those that have endured the test of time, you'll find these features prominent. Three Fools embodies all of them. I don't really know how it is that a hobby card game in this style "breaks out" to the larger culture, but I hope it happens for this game and that it takes root more deeply somehow.
Following Thompson, here are the qualities that I think a traditional style card game must possess to have lasting merit--such a game must be fractal, free-flowing, friendly, and frustrating.
Perhaps not in the strictest mathematical sense, but more than any other genre traditional style card games display an interesting and uncommon game structure wherein the game is comprised of a multitude of repeated small self-similar parts. A game of Spades is made up of a certain (usually indefinite) number of hands, but whether you were playing just a single hand or in the middle of a ridiculous first-to-1,000-points marathon, an outside observer would have no way of looking at the game state and determining which it was. The hands all function identically to each other, and apart from some tally marks on paper somewhere there isn’t any prevailing persistent game structure that they play into.
Similarly, a hand of Spades is comprised of individual tricks—each a tiny game unto itself, just as a single hand could be played as a very short game—but each one is considered individually and doesn’t impact on those that came before or after except indirectly through shaping the cards that remain in each hand. There are games out there that deploy the trick-taking mechanism in service of some larger game system, and inevitably they seem to lose the distinctive feel of a trad card game. Imposing a higher-order structure on traditional mechanisms can certainly create an interesting composite, but it changes focus. These games are self-referentially narrow in scope and are arbitrarily and infinitely "zoom-in-able" / rescaleable.
One effect of this structure is to increase the learning rate, since similar play patterns and scenarios cycle over so quickly. It doesn’t take many hands to figure out in Spades that trying to run a suit for the third time to take it with a Queen often results in someone having a void and trumping. And that’s the kind of observational feedback that comes in handy often since many hands will see a similar scenario emerge at some point. What matters are the subtle differences between these otherwise similar game states each time they occur. That’s the thing that lures players in and gives these games the “one more game” feeling—-each hand is a new puzzle to be solved, close enough in form to where experience is a relevant teacher, but always unique. Very small differences, like holding J-10-7-3 instead of Q-7-3 in a suit, start to have large and identifiably distinct meanings with experience and repeat observation.
You could deal a 4-handed game from a standard 52-card pack every second, and it would still take you upwards of 100 billion universes worth of time until you had exhausted the possibilities for how the hand might have been dealt. It’s almost a certainty, therefore, that no table of players has ever sat down, shuffled a deck, and played the same hand as that which anyone else in history has ever played. It’s a marvel how incomprehensibly deep the array of games states are that can emerge from such a small ludological artifact as a deck of cards, in the same way that incredibly simple mathematical formulas can create surprisingly and infinitely complex fractal shapes. Every time you look at a new hand in a traditional card game, there is a sense of it being both familiar and brand new, and in a game of sufficient complexity a tantalizingly horizon-spanning breadth of possibilities for how the hand might play out.
Partly on account of this repeating game structure, but also because of their typically compact rule sets and direct play patterns, traditional card game can induce a type of ludological "flow state". This is less of a "zoning-out" and more of a "zoning-in", but not in the manner of a tensive hyper-focused task orientation and, instead, a relaxedly engaged “doing the motions” dance of proceeding with confidence and intent down a well-known path. It is the kind of thing that occurs when there is a strong alignment between cognitive / performative capacity and the procedural complexity of a task, and when obstacles and objectives are readily perceived and immediate feedback is available to keep you on track.
In a traditional card game, the common tropes such as following suit or fulfilling contracts, making sets or matching card combinations, enable this flow state by limiting the decision space and focusing the attention. In Pedro or other point-trick games, for example (where there's rarely a need to limit how many tricks you take), it’s obvious if you hold the second-highest card in a suit that you should duck with a lower card if the boss card is led, and it’s obvious you shouldn’t toss point cards to an opponent unless you have to. In a lot of traditional card games, a lot of plays are near decision-less in this way—if you’re waiting on a jack to complete a set in rummy, pick it up if one is discarded; if you’re still starting to build sets, toss an unmatched card rather than something you have two of.
As a result, some folks pan this entire genre of games as too light or too obvious or "for children", but under its broad umbrella there is considerable variety in depth to be had while maintaining the core of quick turns and ease of play that is so much of the appeal. The fact that some decisions are easy, or that some turns require no decisions, doesn’t mean that there are no weighty decisions at all. Typically the added depth in a more involved example comes by way of more significant difficulty-reward trade-offs (shooting the moon in Hearts, blind nil in Spades, grand Tichu bids), more demanding precision play (Bridge's contracts, 99's exact bidding, The Crew’s tasks), or a freer decision space (Zheng Fen’s expansive combinations, and yes, Three Fools’ “play any card”).
Depth is achieved in nearly all such cases within the core game loop rather than on top of it, by requiring higher decision quality without the kind of scope-creep that expands the variety or complexity of decisions (the kind of thing that leads to AP). Perhaps you could liken the flow of a traditional card game and the challenge that the more involved examples present to the sport of trail-running (I’m a hiker rather than a runner, but I have a decent sense): some parts of the exercise really require no decisions at all other than to keep putting one foot in front of the other. There are also both smaller and larger-scale passages in which careful footing must be found or a particular series of well-chosen moves must be made in an exacting sequence.
But there aren’t any times at which a runner need consider whether clambering over these rocks vs those other ones will have lasting ramifications on what happens two miles down the path, or where they must consider the orientation of their body vis-a-vis the sun as they progress down the path in order to achieve the most desirable and balanced tan at the end of the day. Nor are there moments when they have to stop running to shoot a rifle or shoot baskets or shoot photographs that will be judged on their composition in the context of the prevailing preferences of wealthy trail-art patrons. No, it’s all present- and here-focused, with the sole action to be taken to run variously fast or slow, thoughtfully or thoughtlessly, and then loop back and do it again.
Plenty of traditional style card games include aggressive or take-that elements (trump cards, set bids, Uno’s draw-4, skip cards, etc) but because they are so light on overhead and so typically easy to learn and play, they still are enjoyed as highly positively-interactive experiences over which friendships are formed and sustained. Yes, every non-solo board game is a social experience of some kind or another, but even the headiest of card games (Bridge, Poker, maybe) play out primarily as above-the-table experiences. The repetitive structure and ability to function as a foil to a low-impact flow-aligned type of player engagement leaves the table free to chit-chat or to kibitz and dissect tactics in real-time. There’s a sort of camaraderie over a card table unlike that around any other kind of game.
Three Fools, in particular, is utterly fantastic in the way in which it creates whole new ways for players to lightheartedly jab (or jabber) at each other. In something like Go Fish or Trio or Scout or Sea Salt & Paper, there are ways to effectively take cards or points from other players, but it is always one-sided. In Three Fools, being the target of a steal still stings, but there is an upshot in the ability to draw new cards and improve your hand. The give-and-take of how the cards flow between the players and the draw piles is a wonderful way of keeping everyone invested in the interaction going on around the table, and keeping the otherwise directly combative card-stealing from feeling overtly mean or unfair. In the best, most positive sense, "turnabout is fair play" in a traditional style card game.
There's a special kind of interaction that occurs in traditional card games, which distinguishes them from other card games. In games like Magic: The Gathering or Evolution, aggression is the point, and while friendships are certainly formed over playing these games, the game itself isn't intrinsically friendly in the same way because the interaction is so zero-sum. Contrarily, in games like Dominion or Wingspan, while the overall mood of play is positive and non-confrontational, there is nothing directly pro-social about the nature of interaction in the game and players mostly exist in interactive isolation from each other. This is not the same kind of "friendliness" as found in trad card games, in the same way that covering for someone at work is not the same kind of friendly behavior as helping someone move.
Problematic for those who want to be in control of their destiny in a game, but traditional card games are an infinite source of amusement and tantalizing “maybe it will work this time” bravado for those who don’t mind taking a few punches from the cruel hand of fate. There is no feeling in all of gaming like that of making your bid on the final trick with some random low off-trump card you chose to hold onto under the foolish hope that the sequences leading to that last play would work out, and finding that it all came together. But to experience these highs there must be some lows, and what bitter lows they are. An unexpected voided suit on the part of an opponent that instantly nullifies your calculated 3-trick run, the one-rank-higher triplets or the magical 10+-card straight that comes out of nowhere in a climbing game to bust your combo late in a hand and leave you holding one miserably low unplayable card, or the statistically impossible flop at the poker table.
Many many games in a more modern hobby style give players a lot of “outs” and luck-mitigation options, to the extent that the impact of randomness on the game is just to provide multiplicity of outcomes rather than meaningful differentiation between them. You may have been handed three blue workers rather than the two yellow and a green that you would have preferred to play, but in a well-designed and well-balanced modern card game you wouldn’t be at a fundamental disadvantage or have a radically different expected value as any other player and you’d be able to make progress at a roughly equivalent pace as them. This is not the case at all in a trad card game, and the randomness of the deal really can set you back. An old Gin Rummy partner of my parents, when the cards were unkind, used to exclaim “this is a hand like a foot!” You have to make your own luck by going for broke, playing the spoiler, bluffing the table, being the wildcard. You “play the hand you’re dealt”, like it or not.
Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't, and traditional card games do a wonderful job of teaching players to take the good with the bad, while not minimizing the fact that the bad sometimes is really quite bad indeed. Frustration is a natural, normal emotion and working through it in the cost-less magic-circle of the gaming table is a great way for players, young and old, to learn coping skills that have broad applicability in life. Modern games where there's always some way to tweak the outcome or get a boost or do a re-roll or take some consolation prize feel to some extent like they lean into "participation trophy" territory at times. The effect is exacerbated by the artificial closeness of finishes in modern games that do everything they can to balance all hands and all possibilities to keep everyone on an even playing field. Traditional card games are not nearly as kind, and everyone that plays them has experienced a blowout loss and gotten "skunked". It happens to everyone, and it's all in good fun.
These features of traditional card games aren't for everyone, and I don't mean to argue that they should be. Hopefully this post has given you a good sense, though, of what it is that traditional card gamers find fun in games like Three Fools (which is a delightful collage of all of the features I've described).
I love this game. It is a marvel of simplicity that almost anyone can play, and that produces so many moments of pure "fun" without ever feeling forced. It might not land for you, and it might not be your kind of fun, but if you like this style of card games that I've laid out here, it is the very best the hobby has to offer.