Overview
Ninety-Nine is a 3-player precision-bidding trick-taker designed by <PERSON>. More astute gamers might know <PERSON> as the answer to that gamery trivia question, "Who wonthe first Spiel des Jahres prize?" Beyond that, <PERSON> is perhaps better known as a board game historian, focusing especially on card games [his encyclopediaof which makes <PERSON> look like an absolute dunce; aside: if you enjoy any traditional card games, buy this book immediately].
<PERSON> is the designer of a large number of original card games in the traditional style, in which he marshals his expertise on the genre to provide quirks and twists that breathe fresh life into one of gaming oldest genres. There are tinges of Knizian scoring throughout many of his designs, and a general air of a type of "uncanny valley" effect: the games look and feel and sound so familiar, but always just have one bit that's a little weird, out of sync, eery, and so on.
Ninety-Nine is his best such work.
Gameplay
The core of the game is basic trick-taking with a trump suit and typical suit-following restrictions. It is also a member of the precision-bidding family [ Oh Hell!, Wizard, etc] wherein each player must determine before the hand exactly how many tricks they will take, with hand-scoring being primarily based on the success or failure of these bids; unlike "normal" bidding games like Spades, the precision-bidding family requires the player to take no less nor no more than their bid in order to fulfill it.
This is simple enough. The trick is in the manner in which players place their bids. Every player is dealt 12 cards of a 36-card deck, but only 9 cards will actually be played in tricks. Before the hand, each player sets aside 3 cards, the suits of which determine their bid: Diamonds are a bid of "0", spades "1", hearts "2", and clubs "3"... with the bid being the sum total of the chosen 3 cards [the mnemonic for this scheme is that it loosely follows the number of "bumps" on each suit's traditional pip style].
This gives the possibility for a bid anywhere from 0 [3 diamonds] to 9 [3 clubs], or anything in between. Ok, that much is obvious from the rules. 937
What is less obvious, more subtle, and absolutely ingenious are two impacts which this scheme has on the game that wreak havoc on well-established trick-taking memes.
Clever Bits
First, the player is not merely confined to looking at their hand and judging its value. The act of making a bid directly affects the value of the hand in that it removes 3 particular cards [of the player's choice] both from play and from the player's own holdings. You can do all sorts of things to yourself and your opponents as a direct result of your bid choice, including: voiding yourself of a particular suit by bidding all you have, getting rid of low cards from an otherwise strong hand or high cards in an otherwise weak hand, tossing away cards that are likely to be tracked [say, the highest and second-highest trumps] to destroy the ability of your opponents to count cards.
Additionally, because the game rewards precision rather than size of bids [you earn a point for every trick taken, but the minimum bonus for a made bid is 10 points, up to a max of 30, depending on how many players made their bid], there is very very rarely a hand which is categorically "bad". Every hand contains at least one, and probably many, different bid choices which stand a strong chance of being made by a skillful player. The choice of what to bid is impacted by how many points for individual tricks you want to chance, in which ways you hope to stick your opponents with unwanted tricks, and so on. It really is a devious bid system, probably the best ever devised.
Second, because of the nature of bidding games and the asymmetric valuation of suits for the bidding in this particular game, there are marked differences to the inherent value / strength of each suit. Most bids, for instance, will range from 2-4 [since there are 3 players and 9 tricks to be distributed among them]; you'll notice that such bids demand relatively few clubs to be laid aside, and relatively more of the lower-valued suits [especially spades and diamonds]. A typical bid will probably contain no more than 1 card from the heart/club pairing and 2 or more cards from the spade/diamond pairing. Across 3 bids, this means the length of the suits in play will be asymmetric.
Namely, diamonds and spades tend to be very "short" suits [not just in any given player's hand, but at the table], whereas hearts and clubs tend to be "long". 629