Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
In ??????? (Trick-Taking in Black and White), each of the 36 cards has two suits — black and white — and the numbers on a card always add up to 37, e.g., 11 black and 26 white.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Read the full game description
In ??????? (Trick-Taking in Black and White), each of the 36 cards has two suits — black and white — and the numbers on a card always add up to 37, e.g., 11 black and 26 white. At the start of a round, deal the deck evenly to all players. Whoever leads the round plays a card from their hand and chooses either black or white as the suit. All other players play a card of their choice, then whoever played the highest number in the chosen suit collects the trick (recording in some manner whether the trick was white or black), then leads the next trick. Once all the cards have been played, players score their collected tricks. If you have taken an equal number of black tricks and white tricks, then you score positive points equal to the number of tricks collected; if not, you score negative points equal to the number of tricks collected. After a certain number of rounds, whoever has the highest score wins. Not to be confused with En Blanc et Noir, a very similar looking and titled game from the same publisher.