The Fox in the Forest is a new card game from Foxtrot Games and Renegade Game Studios coming out this Summer 2017. It is first and foremost my love letter to trick-taking games. I’ve had a passion for trick-taking games most of my life, going back to a high school experience filled with games of Bridge and Pinochle. I wanted to provide that same type of experience, but in a two-player game, letting players get that same classic, trick-taking feel with only one other player.

As in many trick-taking games, players have a hand of cards with suits and ranks. Half of the cards represent fairy tale characters, like a Fox or a Witch, with beautiful illustrations by storybook artist Jennifer L. Meyer. These cards have special abilities that activate when played: letting you change the trump suit, lead despite losing the trick, and so on. These special abilities provide players with many tools to control the flow of play and disrupt their opponent’s plans. Players score points based on the number of tricks they win in a round. But, if you get greedy and win too many tricks, you’ll fall like the villain in many fairy tales and score no points for the round. This push-and-pull in scoring provides the same sorts of tension that can be found in classic games like Spades and Hearts.

The Fox in the Forest started life as a much different game. Grant Rodiek and I were working on Hocus back in early 2014, a game that is basically Poker with spells. At the time, our vision for it was to include several games in the box. I was looking at trying to create a magical variant of Cribbage. Cribbage was the Buergel family game growing up, a game that my uncles, parents, and grandfather all played, and is the game I have been playing the longest in my life. After I tortured some of my friends with my early magical Cribbage variants, I decided that path probably wouldn’t work.

I retreated with my beloved copy of David Parlett’s “The Penguin Book of Card Games” for inspiration. I knew I wanted to keep it to a two-player version, and I wanted the scoring to reflect both actions in play as well as the end of the hand. In reading through the book, I took inspiration from Piquet and Écarté, both two-player trick-taking games. Piquet, in particular, is an excellent game that I’ve enjoyed in the past. What struck me is that two-player trick-taking games are woefully underrepresented in the hobby. Aside from a small handful of games, I couldn’t really think of any modern takes on the category. Armed with my new inspiration, and keeping to my theme of melding spells with a traditional card game, I re-designed it into a two-player, trick-taking game.

After playtesting and refining this version of the game for a while, and seeing the potential, I finally arrived at a version of the game that I was comfortable showing to blind playtesters. When that feedback was positive, I started thinking about what to do with the game. With its classic feel, and knowing that Randy Hoyt of Foxtrot was a fan of these sorts of games, I sent him the pitch in February of 2016. He had a look at the game, and my hunch was right! It didn’t take long for us to sign a contract and to start further developing the game.

With Randy and his fantastic team on the case, the game improved rapidly. We made the scoring system more sophisticated, expanded the deck by an additional rank, improved the abilities on the cards so they were cleaner in play, and removed some elements that were just a bit much for players to deal with. What emerged from that process was exactly what I’d hoped for at the beginning: a game with the feel of a classic card game, in a tight, modern, beautiful package.

I met my future wife during a game of Bridge. My strongest memory of my grandfather is of playing Cribbage with him. All through my life, classic card games have been there for me, and I’ll always love these types of games. What I hope people find with The Fox in the Forest is a new game, with the depth and style of those classic games, but one that they can share and dive deeply into with a special someone in their life. Thanks to the tremendous work from Randy and his team, I’m so proud of how the game turned out, and I can’t wait to see what everybody thinks of it.