Originally published on Board Game Geek.

I’m a fan of Wil Su’s excellent For Northwood! that uses a custom deck of cards to build a solo trick-taking game. The cards are lovely, but I wondered if they were strictly necessary. As a fan of solo games and the designer of USS Lox, a solo game using a standard deck, I wondered if there were a way to play the game without printing or buying a copy. It turns out Wil designed The Emissary, which is a solo trick-taking game that “holds the core” of For Northwood! It’s collected in Isaludo a book of 10 solo games for a standard deck. I decided to play through the games in no particular order to review them.

So far I’ve only played The Sandwich Guy, which is the second in book order and, according to the handy guide in the front of the book, ranks lowest in Complexity, Weight and Footprint. The Sandwich Guy starts with a hand of 8 ingredients, AKA cards. Each day he needs to create a new sandwich for his customers. To quote the rules:

A sandwich is valid if one of the three cards is exactly between the other two. That is, the difference between the first and second card is the same as the difference between the second and third card.

That’s less complex than it sounds and the game gets simpler from there. A few examples:

• 2–3–4 is a sandwich because the difference between 2 and 3 is 1 while the difference between 3 and 4 is also 1.
• A–3–5 is also a sandwich with a difference of 2.
• K–3–6 is a sandwich that wraps around to include the King (13)
• 3–3–3 is a sandwich because the difference is 0. It’s not a good sandwich, as we will soon see.
• 2–3–2 isn’t a sandwich though because the steps need to increase.

Sandwich classification in this game is quite restrictive, so hot dogs don’t count.

It takes a game or two to get the hang of the math. (It’s base 13 modular arithmetic, which is an essential ingredient for modern cryptography.) There’s a lovely card design that includes a table of valid sandwiches for each card that I’m tempted to print. But it’s probably best to practice a few times so that you always have the game at hand if you have cards.

Now that you know what a sandwich is, rating them turns out to be easy:

• 4—all three cards of the same suit
• 3—all three cards of the same color
• 2—three suits

My headcanon is that the best sandwiches have ingredients in the same class and the worst sandwich has random ingredients tossed together. So a Reuben (corned beef, swiss and sauerkraut) is perfect because all three ingredients fit into the “served in a kosher deli” category. Meanwhile, a fluffernutter (peanut butter, marshmallow fluff and white bread) consists of the random leftover ingredients and only served out of desperation at the end of the day. At any rate, the number rating is important because it determines how many cards you can draw at the end of the turn.

To win the game, you need to draw last card from the draw pile. Consistently serving bad sandwiches will reduce your hand size over time. (Play 3, draw 2.) Eventually you will run out of luck finding ingredients to serve as a sandwich, which is how you’ll lose the game. So a successful strategy is playing good to great sandwiches which replenish ingredients as fast or faster than you serve them.

The book rates The Sandwich Guy as 3 out of 3 luck. You can look ahead and plan your next move (or at least have an idea of what it might be) each turn, so it’s not without interesting decisions. Since you start at the 8-card hand limit, it actually pays to keep a set of ingredients of the same suit in reserve. Serving a 4 sandwich to get only 3 cards back isn’t efficient. But if the card luck turns, you’ll quickly fall into a death spiral of serving crappy sandwiches that don’t let you keep your larder full enough to pull out good or great sets.

⭐⭐⭐ out of 5