Greasy Spoon, Dickory, and Lepidoptery: A Study in Two-Person Shedding Games

Shedding games for two players are a difficult breed. I’ve written about this before, in my review of Thomas Lehmann’s admirable-but-middling Chu Han. There’s something about shedding—a family of traditional card games about playing cards in ever-escalating sets—that refuses to shine in the two-player format.

My diagnosis is that fewer players means less tension. Consider Tichu, which is exclusively a game for four. When I meld, I have to sit through the agonizing possibility that any of three other players—including my teammate—might muck up my plans. Every play is followed by a series of three tensions and (hopefully) three releases. There’s a wonderful arc to that. In Haggis, which is primarily for two, you don’t get the same dramatic build. My opponent either beats my set or they don’t. That’s less interesting. A shedding game for two, I believe, has to exceed that limitation.

I don’t mean to say that two-person shedding can’t be done well. I’m sure it’s possible. While a small handful of designers have put a good deal of energy into cracking the formula, it’s not as though our best scientists have been working on this problem for decades. Unlike its close cousin trick-taking, shedding is a relatively ancillary genre within hobby gaming, so there’s little market reward to encourage experiments along the lines of…

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Author Of article : Andrew Lynch

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