No Loose Ends Introduces New Tricks in Trick-Taking

By Keith Law | October 22, 2025 | 12:31pm

Images courtesy of GameHead

Tabletop Reviews board games

No Loose Ends Introduces New Tricks in Trick-Taking

No Loose Ends is a new, English-language edition of a trick-taking game first published as Shut the Books in Japan, where trick-taking games have really taken off in the last five years or so, with a significant number of trick-takers coming back this way across the Pacific. The challenge, of course, is to create a trick-taking game that does something new, since the main mechanic is so familiar (and, since I grew up seeing my parents play bridge with their friends, kind of boring on its own).

No Loose Ends passes the test with a pretty simple but ingenious twist: You have to predict how many tricks you’re going to win, and then win tricks that match the suits and/or values of the specific cards you laid down in the bidding round. It’s a difficult puzzle to solve, with other players obviously trying to do the same thing with their own bids (all public), and manages to keep most rounds tense right through the last trick.

No Loose Ends has a deck of cards numbered 1 through 15 in four suits, although you’ll vary which cards you use by player count. At the start of each round, there’s a bidding phase, where players go around and play one card from their hands to the table per turn, representing a trick they believe they’ll win. You can bid as few tricks as you’d like, but the maximum bid is equal to eight minus the player count.

Once all players have passed or hit the maximum bid, you move to the trick-taking round. This proceeds as with most trick-takers: you have to follow suit, top value wins. The blue suit is the trump suit, always, and you can’t play it unless you are void in the lead suit or the lead suit was also blue.

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No Loose Ends board game review

When you win a trick, you will try to use it to cover one of the cards you played in the bidding round. If the winning card in the trick has the same suit or the same value as one of the bid cards, you place the trick’s cards face-down to cover the bid card. That will gain you points after the round. If the trick was won via trump card, you can also use the lead card from the trick to cover a bid card. The blue suit is only the trump suit for the trick-taking part; you can’t use a blue card as ‘trump’ to cover another suit unless the values match.

When any player runs out of cards, the trick-taking ends and you tally up the points. You gain two points for every trick you won that covered a bid card, and you lose a point for “loose ends,” meaning every superfluous trick you won or every bid card you couldn’t cover. If you nailed your bid exactly, you get five more points. If, however, someone decides to “snitch” and bids no cards at all, they can upend the scoring by winning zero tricks. In that case, they get 10 points, and everyone else loses 2 points for “loose ends.” You play three rounds, then add up the scores from all of the rounds to determine the winner.

It sounds so simple—and they do try to make it more complicated with a theme around a bank heist—but it works, because every player has personal objectives while the game play itself is entirely interactive. You’re competing against everyone else to win the tricks you specifically need, and trying to deduce who might have what remaining cards so that you win exactly the right number. When I’ve played this, every round has come down to the last trick for almost every player.

The box suggests a player count of two to five; I don’t understand how you could play this with two, as the only trick-taking games I’ve played with two players that really worked were games specifically designed for two players (Sail, Fox in the Forest, Jekyll vs. Hyde). No Loose Ends is best at three or four, like many trick-takers, and gives you something different on the table from just about any other game of this genre I’ve tried.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.