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.
I don’t feel entirely ready to talk about Suppose. I’ve played it the appropriate number of times (three or four), with different numbers of people (three or four), but I can’t seem to form an opinion of it. I’d spend more time with the game, but deadlines are what they are and here we stand on the precipice of a review in which the reviewer is uncertain. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Suppose, published in the U.S. by New Mill Industries, is a trick-taking game designed by Akinori Hagiwara. It is part of that strange subset of trick-taking games called may-follow, in which following the led suit is entirely optional. Here, that’s born out of necessity; you don’t know what most of your cards are.
During setup, each player is dealt a hand of cards. There is now careful—nay, meticulous—work to be done. First, if this is your first time playing, you have to gawk at H.B. Tyson’s gorgeous art. These wonderful surrealist concoctions have yet to go without comment in any of the games I’ve played. Once you’re done with the gawking, no rush, arrange the cards by suit, with the suits in whatever order you want. Within each suit, arrange the cards from highest to lowest.
There are a few games that incorporate these steps, minus the gawking. Xylotar and Luz do much the same thing. If you’ve played either of those, you may be thinking that you know what comes next. “Surely,” said the strawman, “once you’ve arranged the cards, you pass them to the player to your left, and you’re off to the races.” Not so in Suppose. We’re not done yet. It’s time for the most important step: before passing the hand, you have to flip over the first, middle, and last cards.
When you receive your prepared hand from the player to your right, you hold it up and fan the cards so the three flipped cards are facing you. All of your other cards are a complete, or a near-complete, mystery. To you, anyway. Everybody else knows exactly what they are. While Xylotar and Luz get mileage out of denying you any information about your cards other than their suits, Suppose takes a different approach: you know three of your cards, you know your cards are in a particular order, and you know most of the cards everybody else has.
Now, at last, the game proper can beg—wait, I forgot something. The game proper cannot, in fact, begin. We have to bid. How can you meaningfully bid tricks in a game that gives you almost no information about your hand? You can’t, assuming you’re bidding for yourself. But you aren’t. You’re bidding the number of tricks that will be won by the player whose hand you prepared.
We arrive at one of the reasons why I’m still not sure what I think of Suppose. Maybe the reason. Bidding on the next player creates some weird overlapping priorities. Winning a trick is worth one point for me. That’s good. You making the bid you placed for my hand will net you either two or five points, depending. No matter what, it’s better for me to avoid making that bid if I can, and the fact that the game is May Follow—which, again, it has to be—means it’s pretty easy for me to avoid winning those tricks. But then I’m giving points to other people. So. Is it better to avoid hitting that bid? I still haven’t worked it out. Or, rather, I still haven’t worked out how that impacts the way people play. Generally, I think, everyone just tries to win as many tricks as possible while throwing the bidded number of tricks to the next player. And that’s a good way to go about it. It works. But something about the whole thing refuses to settle in my stomach.
Anyway, now, at last, the game proper can begin.
The core is a standard trick-taking game, where the highest card in the led suit wins. When players play any card from their hand that they can’t see, they guess what the card is before revealing it. If they’re right, they get a chip worth half a point. That may not sound like much, but bids are so rarely correct that these guesses form the backbone of Suppose. The game is about winning tricks, but it feels more like it’s about guessing your cards right while you do so. You’re trying to work out what your hand is in real time. It’s tougher than it feels like it should be, and a delight. You can’t see every card at the table, and a few cards aren’t dealt out, so there’s a heavy fog covering up all your certainty.
Suppose is murky, unusual, and memorable. I think my uncertainty comes from an inability to tell, in any sort of clean and clear fashion, how all these different moving parts directly inform play. Suppose is a good game, but it’s one I am no closer to understanding as a work of design than I was when I first sat down to play it. Is that such a bad thing? I suppose not.
