Maybe you’re like me and haven’t heard of a card game mechanic called ladder climbing, or more popularly known as “climbing and shedding” games. John McLeod provides a good description on Pagat.com.
“Each player in turn must play a higher card (or combination of cards) than the previous player. A player who cannot or does not wish to beat the previous play can pass. This continues for as many rounds as necessary until someone makes a play which no one will beat. That player wins the “trick” and leads to another one…Often the aim is to get rid of cards, but sometimes it may be to win cards in ‘tricks’.”
The past few years I’ve been introduced to a few published games in these categories, most notably Scout and Frank’s Zoo. I know one of the most popular I have yet to play is Tichu (which is based on Zheng Feng). While I haven’t played too many published games with these mechanics, I have played many unpublished ladder climbing prototypes in early development stages from my game designer friends.
As I’ve received so much exposure to these mechanics lately, I had the idea that traditional western Domino tiles as a component would be a suitable and interesting alternative to a deck of cards.
I grew up playing All Fives, as many Black folk do, so my mind immediately knew I wanted to have that classic play area restriction where players were required to match the domino tile ends in order to play. I hadn’t seen anything like that before.
In fact, after I had finished my design process, I had discovered that a few more Ladder Climbing games using western dominoes (with no other components) had been web published in the past 4 years (Clackerjack, Chikki, Nougat). However, these seemed to have trick taking mechanics like the typical card games, where the play area doesn’t grow over the course of a full round or it is cleared out and reset, which in my opinion loses that classic “domino” gameplay feel.
In the end, I developed a game that met my goal and I’m excited to share it with you. I’m web publishing it on my website as Ladder Dominoes. I am also in the processing of publishing on boardgamegeek.com and pagat.com.
Let me know what you think!
