Stichling Card Game First Impressions

Stichling is a tricky trick-taking game.

Four Tricks, no waiting.

You won’t play just one trick at a time in Stichling, but up to four! This introduces many exciting choices: Serve this here? Those cards there? Do I open a new trick? With so many options you need to plan ahead carefully and find the right time to secure the most points.

Stichling, German for Stickleback, also known as ‘Monster Trick’ is a trick-taking game where you play 4 tricks at once…

You have a hand of cards and play one at a time in turn order. You can either create a new trick if there are less than 4 out there or add a card to an existing one.

If you start a new trick or add the highest card to an existing trick you put a token on that card to show you’re ‘winning’. You also remove any tokens previously on that trick.

Scoring

When the 4th card in any trick is played, the cards go to the winner (the one who has a token on it) and they flip over their first scoring card…

At the beginning of the round, everyone has a matching set of 3 scoring cards. This picture was taken during round 3 where everyone has cards numbers 3, 6 and 9.

You lay them out as shown, in any order, after you see your hand of cards. When you win a trick, you turn over the first card. Win a second and you turn over the second card, but turn the first card back face down etc

Win a 4th and you cycle back around to your first card again.

After everyone has played all their cards, the current face-up card you have is the one you score for the round. After 3 rounds, most points win (Maximum of 18)

Stichling Summary

It’s a nice take on trick-taking games and I own it so I’ll get to play it more and try to figure out how to win 🙂

My favourite trick-taking game is still Ebbes due to its simplicity and closeness to classic card games.

Jesta ThaRogue