Trumpet

About this board game

Trumpet is a light, short trick-taking game for 2–6 players that plays in about 45 minutes. Players compete to take tricks and move their scoring tokens along a track, racing to cross the finish line first.

The game features six suits, with cards numbered from one through eleven, along with three wild cards. Taking a trick advances your scoring token, but each scoring space can hold only one player. If your move reaches an occupied space, you jump the pieces immediately ahead of you.

Some spaces on the scoring track let a player set one of the suits as trump. As the game progresses, every suit becomes established as some form of trump, with the suits ranked from top to bottom. These changing relationships give the trick-taking play a direct connection to the race on the board.

When a player enters the home stretch, the rules introduce another way to affect the leaders. Instead of moving themselves forward, players may choose to move the leaders back one space. The winner is the first player to cross the finish line.

With its compact play time, six-suit card system, wild cards, and positional scoring track, Trumpet combines trick-taking with a race in which every advance can influence the players ahead. The game won the Games Magazine Game of the Year award in 1991.