Lone Wolves
- Board's Eye View
- Apr 5
- 2 min read
Lone Wolves from WWBG is a clever two-player area control trick-taking card game designed by Yasuyuki Nakamura and Anthony Perone. Art is by Zingco Kang and Yuan Momoco.
The game is played with a deck of cards numbers 2-7 in five suits. Players have a hand of 13 cards and each game is played over 13 tricks. The highest card wins, except that the 2 beats the 7, and you have to follow suit if you can. You play the cards tho' to any location on the board and the card with which you respond does not have to be played to the same location as the card that led. The winner of the trick leaves their card face up where its value will contribute to that player's total for determining area control at the end of the hand; the loser flips their card so it contributes value 1 for the purposes of end-game area control but they have the compensatory benefit of choosing one of the face-up or face-down tokens at their location. The tokens have various different effects but they can offer worthwhile bonuses that mean it will sometimes benefit you more to lose a trick rather than win it (assuming your cards give you that choice).
Locations are closed off if and when there are six cards played there, and knowing that can have an impact on what cards you play and where. The areas over which you are competing have colours that correspond to the five card suits and when an area's tokens have all been claimed then that suit becomes trump. If you've a strong suit of cards then it could be worthwhile focusing on getting tokens taken at that location in order to take trumps...
Lone Wolves is easy to learn and play but there's a lot of depth to the decisions you take over which cards to play and where to play them, so even tho' the game involves just 13 tricks you can reasonably expect games to take around 15 minutes. It's certainly a meaty filler.
