Wouter & Ymke 
In White Hat, each player takes on the role of a hacker working their way through cyberspace to the critical assets, without leaving any traces or getting stuck in a honeypot or denial-of-service.
1-6 players, ages 10+
Playing time: 30-45 minutes
Designers: Ren Multamäki & Thomas Klausner
Artwork: Scott Everts, Jere Kasanen, John Lewis & Juha Salmijärvi
Publisher: Dragon Dawn Productions
White Hat is a trick-taking game that comes with a neat twist: when winning a trick, you advance one of your pawns to a new space through the arrows on the game board, jumping over any spaces that are already occupied. Some spaces allow you to perform an action, while each space is marked with a certain value, and at the end of each round players add up the values of the spaces with their pawn to their score. Unlike in most other trick-taking games, sometimes it’s better to avoid winning a trick if it would make your pawn advance to a high value space, as at the end of the game, the player who collected the least amount of points will win the game.
And then there’s also the ‘White Hat’ card, when played it doesn’t only function as a joker, but it also makes the current trick go to the person who played the lowest combination. This could be an advantage, but at the same time that person will also receive some or all of the cards played in that trick, something you want to avoid near the end of a round as all remaining cards in your hand will be added to your score.
White Hat comes with a double-sided game board and tiles to randomize it, a solo mode and a couple of variants that certainly enhance the game’s replayability.
The game board adds a lot of strategy and timing your trick wins is key. There’s a good dynamic between both and a fresh approach on the trick-taking mechanism which I like a lot.
