Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
With a title like LUZ, Spanish and Portuguese for “light,” you’d expect this Taiki Shinzawa trick-taking game to have a bit more clarity. Silly you. Silly me! LUZ is a game of shadows and half-knowns, a trick-taker that casts a shadow of uncertainty.
Given that Shinzawa is responsible for the likes of Ghosts of Christmas, a trick-taker in which you play three or four must-follow tricks at the same time while the trump suit shifts with player behavior, I should clarify that LUZ isn’t that opaque. It’s all relative. If Ghosts of Christmas is a few standard deviations outside the mean, LUZ is safely within the bell part of the curve.
This is a must-follow trick-taking game where players bid before the hand begins. You have the choice of making an exact bid, which requires you to hit the nail squarely on the head in order to score, or a more forgiving bid that gives you one trick’s worth of wiggle room in exchange for scoring half the points. Higher risk, higher reward.
This doesn’t sound so different from whist, other than the room for some wiggle in your wager. The opacity comes from the last two rules: the back of each card indicates what suit that card belongs to, and you never know the values of your cards prior to playing them.
When cards are dealt out, each player picks up the hand in front of them, arranges the cards in each suit from small-to-large, and then passes the hand to the player on their left. This all has to be done honestly, and there’s no room for creativity. Unlike in Chris Wray’s Xylotar, an almost shockingly similar game, you can’t use the order in which you organize the cards to suggest misinformation. The cards may go from high-to-low or low-to-high, but you mark the high end of the hand with an indicator card. LUZ is the buttoned-down older sibling of Xylotar’s mischievous gremlin-like younger brother.
Despite its opacity, LUZ always feels intentional. It’s all about that bid, and about reading the other hands at the table. Depriving you of knowledge of your ranks while granting you knowledge of everyone else’s suits creates a more intense bidding process. Shinzawa takes what is typically a private, internal calculation and externalizes it. Deciding what to bid in LUZ is more actively iterative than most. You do similar reasoning in something like oh hell, but heuristics are easier to develop and lean on when you can see the values of your cards. LUZ shakes up the status quo just enough to always be interesting. Every hand feels like the first.
Given that each hand is its own universe—this is true of just about every good trick-taking game—it feels odd to have scoring work the way it does. Each subsequent hand is worth more than the last. In a game like oh hell, the potential points increase from hand to hand as the number of cards you get go up, but that means there is greater potential payout for greater power of prediction. More skill, more difficulty, more reward. In LUZ, this hand is just like the last, but you may or may not get more points than you did last time. It isn’t a problem so much as it feels like an arbitrary or even superficial way to turn up the tension.
Like much of Shinzawa’s work, LUZ is a trick-taker’s trick-taker. The gimmick sounds absurd until you spend time with it and realize that you can do things with this information. Real, achievable things. The best part about LUZ is that it brings back the high of discovery. It’s quick, thoughtful, and has many of the same dramatic highs and lows that make trick-taking such a resilient and wonderful space.
LUZ details
- Designer: 新澤 大樹 (Taiki Shinzawa)
- Artists: Crocotame
- Publishers: 999 Games, IELLO, Korokorodou, Lautapelit.fi, Pakufuda Store, Pegasus Spiele, Reflexshop, Tcg Factory
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 3 - 5
- Age range : 10+
- Time range : 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Deduction, Trick-taking
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.0359 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about LUZ.
