The Yellow House, from Mandoo Games, celebrates the brief period in 1888 when the Post-Impressionist artists Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin shared a house together in Arles in France. This card game, designed by Geonil, represents the painters' disagreement over the relative importance to art of Passion, Skill, Money and Inspiration.
Yellow House is a two-player game played over several rounds using a deck of 28 cards: 7 in each of the four suits that represent Passion, Skill, Money and Inspiration. None of the cards have individual values so this is a trick-taking game where you win tricks by playing a card whose suit is ranked higher than the previously played card. You can elevate a suit on the cloth track by spending a card that matches that suit; so, for example, if Inspiration was a level below Skill on the ranking track, you'd need to discard two Inspiration cards to support the Inspiration suit token to raise it above that of Skill and then play another Inspiration card to the trick.
Tho' Yellow House uses a trick-taking mechanic, the key advantage in winning a trick is being able to lead on the next trick; you don't win a round by winning more tricks but by being the first to shed all your cards. It's quite a tricky optimisation puzzle to work out how best to do that by balancing the two different uses you have of each of your cards (ie: to increase the rank of a suit and to play the card to the trick). You know there are seven cards in each suit and you know how many of each you have and so have an idea of how many your opponent has, but that's mostly imperfect information because you are not using the full deck (in round 1, there are four cards left undealt).
The game is beautifully produced with art by Edu Valls that draws on the work of Van Gogh. In addition to the cards, the game uses chunky wooden tokens and a cloth board, and, to add to replayability, it comes with the option to play with variant rules where special powers are triggered - different for each suit - when you use a card to raise the rank of a suit.