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Faust makes a deal with Mephistopheles. Wealth, honour, pleasure, knowledge, all the good stuff. In return, he puts his soul on the table, which feels like a questionable way to start your day. In Faust vs Mephisto, that old story becomes a two-player trick-taking game where one player is Faust and the other is Mephisto.
The game is built around four suits: love, knowledge, power, and youth. These are the things Faust is chasing, and also the things Mephisto is trying to corrupt. I like that this idea doesn’t just sit there as background flavour. It matters in the way you play. You’re not simply trying to win tricks. Sometimes winning is exactly the problem.
If one player ends up with all cards of a suit, that suit falls to Mephisto. It doesn’t matter who collected them. Faust can lose himself just as easily by taking too much, which fits the story well. So yes, it’s a trick-taking game, but one where the question is often, “Do I really want this trick?” That question fits Faust: do you stop, or do you take just a little more?
👥 2 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designer: Geonil
🎨 Artwork: Javier González Cava
🏢 Publisher: Mandoo Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay overview
At its core, Faust vs Mephisto is a small two-player trick-taking game played over a maximum of two rounds. Each round has ten tricks. The deck has 22 cards, but two cards are removed from the round without being shown, so both players start with ten cards. In the first round, Mephisto deals and starts. If the game goes to a second round, Faust deals and starts that one.
The basic trick-taking part is easy enough. One player leads a card, the other player must follow the same suit if possible, and if both cards are from the same suit, the higher number wins. So far, so familiar. The twist comes when different suits are played, because there is no fixed trump suit. Instead, the strength of the suits changes during the round. When a suit appears for the first time, its token is placed on the track on the board. In general, suits that appear later become stronger because they are placed higher on that track.
The game doesn’t leave it there. Knowledge stays fixed once it has entered the board, so it keeps its place for the rest of the round, even when the other suits reset. Power is stranger. It normally goes into the second-lowest available space, which can make it strong quite quickly. But if there is only one normal space left, power drops into the extra space below the track and becomes the weakest suit.
Love also has its own rule. You normally can’t lead with love, unless you only have love cards left, or a love card has already been played earlier in the round. Youth is the simple one. No special rule there. Once all four suit tokens are on the board and the trick is finished, the suit strength resets. All tokens are removed except knowledge, which stays where it is. Then the track starts filling again as suits appear.
At the start of each round, both players get two coins. On your turn, you can spend a coin to make your opponent play a card from their hand on your behalf. You name a suit and say “highest” or “lowest”. If they can legally play that suit, they must play the highest or lowest card of that suit, depending on what you asked for. If they can’t play that suit, because they don’t have it or because it isn’t legal at that moment, they still have to follow the highest or lowest instruction with another legal suit. The normal rules for following suit and playing love still apply.
If the card they play for you wins the trick, you win that trick. It’s a strange little moment, because you’re asking your opponent to help you while both of you know there is probably something nasty behind it. Both players can even use a coin in the same trick. It doesn’t cancel anything. It just means both players are playing cards for each other, which can make the table feel like a tiny legal dispute.
Because of the coins, hand sizes can become uneven for a while. If you have no card to play, you must use a coin. That also means both players end up using the same number of coins during a round. The winner is not the player who wins the most tricks. At the end of each round, you check the suits. If one player has collected all cards of a suit, that suit flips to Mephisto’s side. After the first round, if two or more suits have fallen to Mephisto, Mephisto wins immediately. If not, you play the second round. After the second round, Mephisto wins if two or more suits have fallen. Faust wins if at least three suits are still on his side.
So the game is not about grabbing everything. It’s about making sure no one gets too greedy with one suit, because that is exactly when Mephisto starts smiling.
Artwork, components, and visual design
The box is small, and the contents are small too, but not in a bad way. You get the board, 22 oversized cards, four double-sided suit tokens, and four coins. It’s a compact production, and I like that. Not every two-player game needs to arrive in a box the size of a small oven.
The artwork gives the game a dark, old literary feeling. The cover has Faust in a red, infernal glow, with Mephisto behind him, so you know what kind of story you’re stepping into. This is not a game about planting carrots. The cards are where the game feels most alive. Each suit has its own colour and mood. Love is red and warm, knowledge uses blues with books and scholars, power has gold tones with crowns and authority, and youth is green with nature and energy.
That clear colour work helps a lot, because you’re checking the suits all the time and I don’t want to fight the graphic design while also fighting Mephisto. I also appreciate that the cards don’t feel like the same idea copied 22 times. For such a small deck, there is quite a bit of illustration going on, and many cards have their own scene. That helps the game feel richer than the component count suggests.
The board is mostly there to show the suit strength, but it’s not just a plain track. It looks like a messy scholar’s desk with books, scrolls, candles, and all the usual “someone has been thinking too much” equipment. It gives the table a bit of that “old scholar who needs sleep” feeling, while still showing the suit track clearly.
The suit tokens are the kind of component I like: clear, colourful, and not trying to be more complicated than needed. They’re double-sided, so you can see whether a suit is still with Faust or has fallen to Mephisto. The coins help the game feel more physical than I expected from such a small box. They look more special than basic cardboard markers, and since you handle them during the game, that helps. It doesn’t feel luxurious, but it doesn’t need to. The production fits the size of the game.
Our experience
Our first play of Faust vs Mephisto started with a normal card game reflex. You see a trick, you look at your hand, and you wonder if you can win it. That’s what trick-taking games have trained us to do for years. Here, that instinct gets you into trouble quite quickly. A won trick can help, but it can also pull too many cards of the same suit to one side of the table, so we had several turns where the best move was not the one that looked strongest at first glance. That was the moment where we stopped treating it like a normal trick-taking game and started paying more attention to where the suits were collecting.
Love and knowledge felt especially fragile because there are fewer cards in those suits, so they can become dangerous faster. Youth gave us more room to breathe, while power kept creating strange timing questions because of the way it enters the strength track. It’s called power, but sometimes it manages to arrive at exactly the wrong time. Which feels about right for someone who thinks they’re important.
The changing suit strength also made each lead feel more meaningful than we first expected. A low card can still do something if its suit is in a good position, and introducing a new suit changes more than the current trick. It can affect what the next few turns look like. That made us pause more than expected, not because we were confused, but because one small card could make the next few turns messier. It didn’t feel heavy because of rules, but because you keep second-guessing your own good ideas.
The coins are where the game becomes a little cheeky. You’re not only thinking about what card you want, but also what card you believe your opponent still has, and whether they can legally play it. When it works, it feels great. When it doesn’t, you get that lovely little “ah, I did this to myself” moment. We had a few of those. Educational, painful, funny afterwards.
Our first round was mostly a learning round, not because the rules are long, but because the goal is unusual. I made a few choices that looked fine in the moment and then turned out to be little gifts to Mephisto. Very generous of me. The devil has enough already, but apparently I wanted to help. After that, we started seeing the traps before stepping into them. Well, some of them. Once we understood which suits were becoming dangerous, the choices became much more enjoyable, and the game felt less like “what am I supposed to do?” and more like “how do I avoid making things worse?” After that, the small deck worked in the game’s favour, because you can remember what has happened and start blaming yourself properly.
Our thoughts
The rules don’t just mention temptation, they make you feel it when you take one card too many. Wanting more is often the trap, and that gives the game a nice connection to the story without needing a long explanation.
I also like that it doesn’t feel interchangeable with every other small trick-taking game. For only 22 cards, it has a particular flavour. You know pretty quickly whether this is your kind of thing or not, and I mean that in a positive way. The extra rules mostly feel worth having. I enjoy when a small card game has one strange idea it commits to, and this one commits quite hard.
That also means it won’t be for everyone. Some players may look at the suit track, the special suit rules, and the coins and think, “I just wanted to play a few cards.” And I get that. This is not the one I’d bring out with everyone, and I don’t think it needs to be. It feels more suited to two players who enjoy a small duel with a bit of bite, rather than a filler you teach while people are still opening drinks and looking for the snack bowl.
My biggest question is how it will feel after many plays. With only 22 cards, regular players may become quite good at reading what is left. That could make the game better, because both players start to understand each other more and the guessing becomes more personal. But it could also make some rounds feel more planned out than surprising. I haven’t played it enough to know where it lands, so for now that stays a question rather than a criticism.
Faust vs Mephisto is a two-player card game I kept thinking about after the box was closed, mostly because I wanted to play again and make fewer generous donations to Mephisto. It’s not the easiest game to introduce, and it’s probably not the best choice if you want something completely relaxed. But with the right opponent, I can see it becoming the kind of game where you want to reset and try again, partly because you understand it better now, and partly because Mephisto got more help than he deserved last time. If you like two-player card games where a small hand of cards can still make you squirm a little, this is a curious one in the best way. It has a few sharp corners, but those corners are also what made it memorable. Just maybe don’t sign anything Mephisto offers you before reading the fine print.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Mandoo Games.
