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.
Whoever walked away from a hand of trick-taking and thought, “Hey, you know what would make this better, is if we had to guess how many tricks we would win beforehand,” has my eternal gratitude. I like to think bidding came about as a party trick. “Françoise is really good at tarot, I bet he can guess exactly how many tricks he’ll win. Guess, Françoise, guess.”
However bidding started, it has long been a cornerstone of trick-taking, and is reliably my favorite way to engage with the mechanic. Card games are inherently subject to tremendous amounts of luck, of course, but bidding shifts the balance a bit closer to skill. More skill means more agency. More agency means more investment. More investment means more fun for everyone.
Torchlit is, above all, a bidding game, though it’s a strange one. The deck is dealt out, and every player chooses a card from their hand to put face-down on the table in front of them. The numbers on those cards, which run from 0-7, correspond to a series of dungeon door tiles placed out in the center of the table in numerical order. Whichever card you put down, the matching door is where you want to end up by the end of the hand.
You move ahead a door every time you win a trick, or every time you play a card of the same rank as the winner. The latter rule is a kindness from designer David Spalinski. It gives players a bit more control over how and when they move, and makes short-suited hands even more desirable than they already often are.
Whoever plays the lowest card in the suit takes the Torchbearer token, which gives them two responsibilities. They’ll lead the next trick, but before that, they have to distribute some of the played cards to the board. One card from each suit played into the trick has to go under the matching door. If, for example, the blue 2, 5, and the yellow 3 were played, the yellow 3 would go under Door #3, and either the blue 2 or 5 would go under the corresponding door.
For what, you may ask? For scoring. While calling your bid correctly gets you 3 bonus points at the end of a hand, the cards under your door are worth points regardless. Dragons, the trump suit, are worth 2 points, and other cards are worth 1 apiece.
This is more of an explanation than most trick-takers require, and we are skimping on some of the details. That’s not necessarily a good thing; for every Cat in the Box, where all those extra rules add up to something spectacular, there are plenty of trick-takers that overshoot what the form can bear. That’s not the case with Torchlit. Every rule is here for a reason. Every rule makes your choice of card from trick to trick much more interesting and much more important than it otherwise would be. If the rules make it less likely I would suggest Torchlit to people who don’t play a lot of games, the texture those rules provide makes Tochlit one of the first trick-takers I’d reach for when presented with a regular gaming group.
Most trick-taking games include a healthy number of tricks during which you’re not doing much. There’s a fair amount of biding your time, which is something I like about the form. Torchlit doesn’t have many tricks like that at all. You’re always angling for something, whether it’s trying to move ahead, or get another card out under your target door, or deprive someone else of the points you’re pretty sure they want. I’ve seen a lot of feedback suggesting that Torchlit is a bad trick-taker for people who want a high level of control. So far, I disagree. I think you can do a lot here if you have the inclination. Torchlit rewards the most daring and dedicated explorers more than most. There are treasures aplenty to be found, provided you’re brave enough.
Torchlit details
- Designer: David Spalinski
- Artists: David Spalinski, Harry Conway, Phil Rynda
- Publishers: (Self-Published), Allplay, Little Dog Games
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2 - 5
- Age range : 10+
- Time range : 30 - 45 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Trick-taking
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.3453 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Torchlit.
