Fox in the Forest praise; idea for a resolution procedure in a blood opera dramatic narrativist game

Been playing Fox in the Forest with my partner.

I'm still new to this modern board game scene; so far it's been this, a lot of Root, one session of Spirit Island, and one session of Arcs. It's hard to believe my family wasted so much time on Clue and Risk when there has been better stuff out there for 40+ years.

Anyway, Fox in the Forest. It's a two-player trick-taking game* with two twists: first, if you win too many tricks in a given hand, you lose points, and second, half the cards have special powers that change your hand, trump, etc.

*(This sounds awful but what it means is that it's like hearts. You compare cards in a given suit and the high card wins. If you can't match suits, play any card from any suit. Also, there's an extra-special suit, and if you play a card from that suit you beat any card not from that suit, no matter what.)

When you're playing, you have to balance considerations like the following:

Am I trying to play high (win most tricks) or play low (win few or no tricks)? How many tricks has my opponent won?

How long can I go before I have to decide if I'm playing high or low? How strong is my hand overall? 

Am I leading a card under 7? Can my opponent play a 7 to win this trick and get a bonus point?

If I'm trying to play high, is this the strongest card I can play? If I'm playing low, is it the weakest?

How many card of each suit do I have left?

Do I want to change up the trump suit? When? Is it worth losing a trick to do that?

Do I want to draw a new card? When? Is it worth losing a trick to do that?

In my most recent game, my partner utterly destroyed me. She sandbagged early, and I felt like I was doing great, beating her bad cards with my bad cards, while saving my good cards for later; as I soon found out, she only had bad cards, and I felt my stomach sink as I realized there was no way I could possibly lose the final 4 or so tricks. She played low and she snookered me good.

Bonus role-play content

Trick-taking as a resolution procedure. Each player has a hand of cards, some of which have special abilities. Each suit represents a different fictional approach: aggressive/direct, defensive/avoidant, tricky/manipulative, and sensitive/open. When you play a card, you commit to taking a specific fictional approach in your action.

The basic procedure is akin to Sorcerer, absent the free and clear. When conflict breaks out, go in a circle around the table playing cards. The person who initiated the conflict leads. (In future tricks, the winner of the previous trick leads the new one.) We'll go through all cards dealt, from highest to lowest, first trump suit, then lead suit, then any other suits, resolving actions. Since every pair of cards will have a winner, we can declare the winner of every sub-conflict within the complex conflict.

Suit superiority diagram; one approach pointing to another beats that approach, all else being equal. Not sold on this diagram, because there's always an argument to be made for another format.

Tricky is strictly worse than open here. (This is inevitable in four-way rock-paper-scissors; one option must be the short straw.) You'd never play tricky if you could play open, if we're only considering your odds of getting what you want. So we'll give tricky some added benefit, like, after each tricky play, you can draw one card that someone has played this trick, then discard one card.

For orthogonal conflicts, as in Sorcerer, we can say that if your action has already been resolved when we get to someone targeting you, you can play any defense from your hand. (Or just any card from your hand?) Otherwise, if someone is targeting you and you haven't gone yet, you'll lose, obviously.

Trump suit will vary based on formal and organic rules. Probably we simply declare the starting trump suit for each scene after simply surveying the situation: say some spies are trying to break into a warehouse, in which case, tricky is trump. (Or maybe defensive is trump? If the warehouse is well-guarded?) Within the scene, we should change up trump based on formal rules (the 3, below) or unanimous consent.

Fox in the Forest has special abilities on each odd card; let's see if we can directly rip them off.

1. If you lose this trick, you lead the next trick.

3. You may replace the trump card with a card from your hand.

5. You may draw a card from the deck and add it to your hand; then discard a card from your hand.

7. If you win this trick, +1 point.

9. Once played, treat this card as the trump suit.

11. When you lead with this card, if your opponent has a cards of the same suit, they can only play either their highest card of that suit or the 1 card from that suit.

I think this translate nicely, though of course testing and refinement will be necessary.

7s could be things like, deal an extra damage, or extend your defense to another character. (Maybe we'll give each 7 a custom ability by suit.)

I envision building characters by doing a mini deck-building activity. You probably draw a new hand every scene, but you can specialize your character by making rules like "Draw 11 cards, and then keep drawing until you have 3 tricky cards. Set all tricky cards aside, and randomly discard other cards until you have 11 cards total." Something like that. We'd need to work out the real details.

Damage forces you to discard a card (at random?), and of course you're knocked out when you're out of cards.

Minor characters have fewer cards with stronger restrictions. A bank has two or three cards, one or two of which must be defense. (I'll have to figure out a way to scale hands; based on thematic weight, actual modeling, what?)

Anyway, that's the idea! If I get around to testing it, I'll probably just crib Sorcerer scenario creation.