Pass Pass
Designed by: Alexandre Droit,David Paput
Pass Pass is a [simple_tooltip content=’one player leads a suited card, and – usually – other players must follow suit if they can’]trick-taking[/simple_tooltip] game of fleeting alliances and divergent paths to victory.
The game consists of a deck of cards in four suits – pink, yellow, green, blue – numbered 1-12, some of which have diamonds on them. Everyone is dealt a hand of cards and critically the backs of the cards hide the number, but not hide the card’s colour, so you can always see what suits everyone still has in their hand. Play begins with the starting player playing a card face-up to the table, then everyone follows clockwise: this is the trick.
In Pass Pass, you do not have to follow suit if you don’t want to. But sometimes you will want to, because of how the scoring works. At the end of each of the game’s three rounds, players will score a point for each card they claimed during play, and additional points for each diamond on their claimed cards. When the last card is played in a trick, any cards in the same suit/colour are added together before the suits are compared for strength; the highest strength winning. For instance, if you and I played the 11 and 8 in blue, our combined strength is 19. The player who played the strongest card in the winning suit chooses any one card from the trick for themselves, then the player who played the second-strongest card in the winning suit claims the two weakest cards for themselves. So in each trick you are looking for these temporary collaborations in order to finish first, or – as is often the case – second. Whomever finished second and claimed two cards begins the next trick, until all tricks are played and then claimed cards are scored.
Except that’s not it, because there’s another way to win.
If during a round you manage to claim a card of each of the four suits, this is called a pass pass. If a player gets a third pass pass at any time before the final round scoring, they instantly win the whole game! This shoot-the-moon opportunity for victory isn’t just a tacked-on idea: it informs play from very early on as you need to think about whom you team up with and, when you do any claiming, what cards you leave for your partner. Careful play is needed to avoid gifting a pass pass victory to someone!
Sam says
One of those games where the rules are very easy but decisions are far from it. Early-rounds especially it’s opaque enough to feel extremely mysterious, but Pass Pass’s cleverness lies in how that sense of grasping in the fog starts to lift as cards are played – keeping track of which cards exactly doesn’t hurt – and hands shrink in size. I’d find it engaging enough without the pass pass objective, but that addition elevates this game from quirky curio to something approaching a mini-classic, as long as you don’t mind a little brain-fry en route to success or defeat.
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Take That!
Plenty of interaction of the deprivation kind, but nothing that feels especially arbitrary or personal
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Fidget Factor!
Lower with fewer players, but even with 5 or 6 the game shouldn't take forever
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Brain Burn!
Where to start? The rules are very straightforward, but who to combine with - assuming you can - and when, and *how* are the factors to mull over in every trick of every round. The game is a poser, for sure.
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Again Again!
Variety here comes from player decisions and tactical chicanery. It doesn't resonate with theme or produce a bundle of laughs, but it feels very much like a classic game that might have been played with a standard deck of cards over many years.
