Designed by Tsutomu Dejima, Milkuro is a deceptively easy-to-play trick-taking card game for 2-4 players from Japanese publisher Korokorodou. It's one of the games we picked up at this year's Spiel Essen. Players have a hand of cards, each of which has a value or 1-44 in White and 44-1 in Black: the two numbers on each card total to 45; so, for example, if a card has a value in White of 34, its value in Black is 11.
Players are each dealt a hand of 10 or 11 cards, depending on the number of players, and the player leading a trick announces whether he is playing his card for its White or Black value. Other players must similarly play their cards for that trick in the same 'colour'.
The twist in this game is that you are rewarded for achieving a Black/White balance in the tricks you win. In the two-player game, the winner of each hand is the player with the smallest difference between the White and Black tricks they've won. With three or four players, you total the number of tricks you've won and if the number of White and Black tricks are equal, your score is positive but if it's unequal then that score is negative.
This unusual scoring makes for a tactically fascinating game where you're chasing balance rather than necessarily the number of tricks: even in the three- or four-player game, the scoring means that you can be better off letting another player win a trick rather than rack up tricks that leave you with a lack of Black/White balance. As you might guess, the positive>negative scoring can make the last trick in a hand particularly punishing. There are more cards than you have in play (in the two-player game, more than half the deck remains undealt in each hand) so this isn't a game which gives any noticeable advantage to card counters.
Milkuro is a card game that anyone can play straight out of the pocket-sized box with almost no rules overhead beyond an explanation of the end-hand scoring. Tho' it's highly accessible, you'll soon discover it has greater depth than may be initially apparent...