Wouter & Ymke 
Fresh snow has covered the mountain and a new season has started. In Snowy Tricks, we’re snowboard instructors trying to prove that we’re the best instructor around. Naturally, we do this by sending our students down the mountain while we remain safely at the top. They perform the tricks, we take the credit. I mean, that’s teaching, right?
Behind the snowboards and animal students is a trick-taking game where winning isn’t always what you’re trying to do. There are several prizes available, and they can ask very different things from you. Sometimes you need to win, sometimes you need to stay behind another player, and sometimes you’re mostly interested in which cards end up in front of you. So you’re not only trying to work out who can win the next trick, but also who actually wants it.
👥 2-5 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designers: Adrie Drent, Esther Jacobsen, Alexander Kneepkens & Vicky Trouerbach
🎨 Artwork: Olivier Fagnère
🏢 Publisher: Jolly Dutch (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Snowy Tricks is played over several rounds. At the start of the game, three prize cards are placed on the table, one from each prize category, together with a separate prediction prize. These are the objectives everyone will be working towards. Each player also has a set of instructor cards, which are used to mark the prizes they manage to claim during the game.
At the beginning of a round, everyone receives a hand of student cards. One additional student card is turned face-up and its colour determines trump for that round. Before anyone starts playing, you can also predict exactly how many tricks you think you’ll win. This is optional, but making a prediction requires you to place one of your student cards aside. The number on that card becomes your prediction, and you won’t be able to use the card during the round.
After that, the actual trick-taking is fairly familiar. One player leads a student card and everyone else must follow its colour if possible. If you can’t follow, you can play another colour, including trump. The highest card of the leading colour normally wins, unless one or more trump cards have been played. In that case, the highest trump wins. The winner takes all cards from the trick, places them in their personal score pile and leads the next trick.
There are also four special student cards in the deck: two best students and two worst students. These have no colour and can be played at any time, even when you could have followed the leading colour. The best student automatically wins the trick, while the worst student automatically loses it. If two identical special students appear in the same trick, however, they cancel each other out. Both are discarded and those players no longer take part in deciding that trick. You can also lead with a special student, in which case the first coloured card played afterwards determines the colour to follow.
Special students can be used for predictions as well. Using the worst student means predicting that you’ll win no tricks, while the best student means you’re going for all of them. Because anyone making a prediction has one fewer card to play, the final trick can contain fewer cards than there are players. The round continues until everyone’s hand is empty.
Then it’s time to see what you’ve actually achieved. The prizes can look at how many tricks you’ve won, compare your result with another player, or check the numbers and colours among the cards you’ve collected. You can claim several different prizes in one round, but you can’t claim the same prize twice in that round. A correct prediction can earn the prediction prize as well. Each prize you claim gets one of your instructor cards. Normally the game ends when someone places their sixth instructor card, although the two-player game uses five. You score the stars on the prizes you’ve claimed, with another five points available for either claiming the same prize at least three times or having an instructor card on all four prize types.
Artwork & Components
Snowy Tricks comes in a small box and is entirely made up of cards. There are 55 regular student cards, four special students, 19 prize cards, instructor cards, a trump card, the prediction prize and a bonus point overview card. There’s not much to set up on the table, apart from arranging the prizes and giving everyone their instructor cards.
The student cards immediately caught our attention. They’re filled with animals in snowboarding gear, including penguins, foxes, and some creatures that seem considerably more confident on a snowboard than I would be. They’re shown jumping, racing and generally behaving as though travelling down a frozen mountain on a plank is perfectly sensible. The illustrations are colourful without making the cards difficult to read, and the numbers and colours remain visible when you’re holding them in your hand.
The prize cards are much more functional. Their different coloured borders separate the three categories, while symbols and examples show what you need to collect or achieve. Stars indicate both difficulty and points. Some objectives take a little more checking during the first few rounds, especially those involving patterns in the cards you’ve collected, but after we’d seen them a few times we weren’t spending much time deciphering them.
I also like that the presentation doesn’t try to turn this into something larger than it is. It’s a card game about snowboard instructors and their animal students, and that’s basically what you get in the box. The artwork gives us plenty to look at without getting in the way of the numbers and colours we actually need while playing.
Our Experience
From the first round, we knew we couldn’t approach Snowy Tricks by simply trying to take the tricks we were capable of winning. We’ve played enough trick-taking games to be familiar with deliberately ducking tricks, managing trump and trying to hit an exact number. What took us a little longer to get used to was separating two questions that would normally be closely connected: did we want to win the trick, and did we actually want the cards inside it? Quite often the answer was yes to one and no to the other.
That became especially noticeable once several objectives started crossing over. I might be trying to hit my prediction while also collecting cards for another prize, so one particular trick could help me twice. Someone else could be trying to stay behind their neighbour, while another player only cared about one colour sitting in the middle of the table. We quickly stopped judging a play simply by whether somebody could win. Instead, we started looking at why they might want to win, and that’s much harder to read. There were several occasions where we understood exactly what cards someone probably still had, but completely misunderstood what they intended to do with them.
Predictions gave us something else to think about. We already knew that committing to an exact number would affect how aggressively we played, but removing the prediction card itself mattered more than we initially expected. Sometimes that was annoying because we’d sacrificed a useful value. At other times, removing our only card of a colour was exactly what we wanted because it allowed us to play trump earlier. After a few rounds, choosing the card for a prediction became almost as important as deciding what number we thought we could reach. It wasn’t simply “I think I’ll win three”, because the card saying three was also disappearing from the hand we were using to achieve it.
The best and worst students gave us some control when those plans started going wrong. The best student is easy enough to understand, but we probably enjoyed the worst student more. When you’re sitting on exactly the number of tricks you predicted and there are still cards to play, being able to say “no thanks” to a trick is very useful. Of course, we also had identical special students cancel each other out, which resulted in one player going from looking very pleased with their escape route to checking the rules again. Snowboarding can be cruel.
What I found particularly interesting was how differently people around the table could approach the same hand. Those of us with more trick-taking experience were still keeping track of colours, thinking about remaining trump cards and watching when somebody became void. That knowledge certainly helped, but it didn’t tell us everything. Less experienced players could concentrate more directly on the visible prizes, and their choices weren’t always the ones we’d predict from traditional trick-taking habits. Sometimes that disrupted our plans, but it also meant we couldn’t rely entirely on familiar patterns. We had to pay attention to the person as much as the cards.
Our Thoughts
Predictions, special cards that force an outcome and games where you don’t always want to win a trick are all things we’ve encountered before. The difference is that the three prize categories care about different parts of your round. One objective can care about your number of tricks, another about your position compared with a neighbour, and another about the cards you’ve collected. So you’re rarely chasing just one thing, and a hand that looks useful for one prize might not get you very far with another.
What you claim in one round can also affect what you want to chase in the next. You can earn five bonus points by claiming the same prize at least three times, but there’s another five-point bonus for having claimed something from all four prize types. If we’ve already claimed the same prize twice, going for it again becomes quite tempting because of those five bonus points. In another game, we might have instructor cards spread across three prize types and start looking at the missing fourth instead. So the prize that’s easiest to claim isn’t always the one we actually want. Without those bonuses, we’d mostly look at the prizes in front of us and start again from scratch each round. Instead, an instructor card we’ve already placed can influence which prize we chase next.
Our main reservation is that you can’t always predict why another player will want or avoid a trick. Everyone can be working towards something different, and another player’s perfectly reasonable choice can ruin what you were trying to do. That also makes the usual information you get from another player’s choices less reliable. Someone avoiding a trick might be protecting their prediction, trying to stay behind their neighbour or simply avoiding one particular card. We wouldn’t call that random, because another player has made that choice for a reason. The problem is that you won’t always know what that reason is. You can still read the cards, but reading the reason behind a play is much harder. If you mainly enjoy trick-taking because you like calculating several tricks ahead and gradually narrowing down exactly what everyone will do, that can be frustrating.
We also didn’t find every combination of the three prize cards equally interesting. We preferred games where several players were competing over related conditions because our choices affected each other more directly. Other combinations allowed people to concentrate more on their own collections, and those rounds weren’t as interesting for us. The rules let you choose the three prize cards instead of drawing them randomly, so once you’ve played enough to know them, I suspect many groups will start selecting combinations they particularly enjoy. The first games are partly about discovering what the different prizes do, while later games depend more on how those particular objectives work together.
I can especially see Snowy Tricks working with groups where everyone enjoys card games, but not everyone has the same amount of trick-taking experience. Experienced players still get to use what they know about following colours, trump and card distribution, but those skills don’t answer every question the game asks. At the same time, someone with less experience can look at a prize, understand what they’re trying to achieve and work towards it without needing years of trick-taking habits behind them.
For us, the part that stayed interesting was having to judge the trick and the cards inside it separately. We were still counting cards, watching trump and trying to work out what everyone could play, but that was only half the information we needed. The other half was figuring out what everyone actually wanted. Not every round worked equally well, and there were certainly times when somebody else’s objective made our own plan disappear rather quickly. But some of our favourite moments came when everyone wanted something different from the same trick. Those were the rounds where we were quite happy to shuffle the students and send them down the mountain again.
📝 We received a copy of Snowy Tricks from from Jolly Dutch.
Jolly Dutch also gave me a personal affiliate code: TABLETOPPING.
With this code, you get 10% off a yearly Jolly Club subscription during the first year. In the Netherlands, that means the subscription goes from €60 to €54. The Jolly Club is currently available only in the Netherlands and Belgium, and the Belgian version is slightly more expensive because of shipping.
If you decide to use the code, I receive a small commission. No pressure at all, of course. Just sharing it in case you were already considering it.
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