Piñatas Game Review

Piñatas is an unusual trick-taking game. That’s always a good place to start. I like the weird ones. But unlike, say, Ghosts of Christmas, or Cat in the Box, or Inflation!, Piñatas isn’t unusual as a result of some baroque approach to the card play. To the contrary, Piñatas is a must-follow trick-taking game with a trump suit. That’s about as straightforward as the genre gets.

Piñatas is unusual because it concerns itself first and foremost with timing. Most trick-taking games are focused on quantity, whether they are asking you to win as many tricks as possible, or no tricks, or a specific number of tricks. Piñatas asks you to be mindful of when you win your tricks.

Each time a player wins a player count–dependent number of tricks, they drop out of the round. The later you can manage to drop out, the better, since you score points equal to the number of tricks other players have won when you dip. Sounds easy, right? Just win your tricks as late as possible. It isn’t that simple. As is often the case with Reiner Knizia’s best games, there’s a catch. The last player left in the round doesn’t score…

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