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A trick-taker that gives as much information as it conceals, there are often two games being played simultaneously here and both are worth it.
One of the greatest films that went largely overlooked in recent years was The Death of Stalin:
https://youtu.be/E9eAshaPvYw?si=-39BSsr2AvG9BFRi
It's a hilarious spoof of a crucial event in Soviet history that ended the absolute power of Josef Stalin and spread it to... a bunch of guys who were mostly interested in accumulating that same control over the state. This, then, is the essence of the game Power Vacuum, in which players are trying to accumulate power (basically VPs) while also betting on which of their rivals might end up with more or less power than themselves as everyone attempts to climb the ladder by stepping on (or boosting up) those around them. Indeed, when I first saw this game announced by Keen Bean Studio, I thought that the film might have been the direct inspiration. The fact that designer, Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher, and publisher, Malachi Rempen, decided to engage the absurdist theme of the phrase "power vacuum" and make all of the players into anthropomorphized appliances (toaster, blender, old style telephone, etc.) represented by Rempen's "bean people" art style was just icing on the cake for me.
The game is a standard trick-taker in that each player begins a hand with eight cards and someone leads a card from one of the four suits (Money, Media, Bureaucracy, Violence) and others must follow suit if they can, with the highest value card (1-9) of the led suit taking the trick. However, the red suit (Violence) is trump, which means you can win the trick with a lower value card of that suit. However, there are also four brown cards in the deck, which are Spies. The Spies function as trump against Violence (and only Violence), so there is a way to beat someone who ends up with a hand full of red cards. How would you know they they have that kind of hand? Because unlike most other trick-takers, the suit of the cards in question are all visible on their backs. So, people will know what you're able to play before they lead the trick, which provides another level of interpretation that is unusual in this type of game. The exception, again, are the Spies, who all show one of the regular suits on their backs, so that opponents generally won't know you have a trump-breaker in hand until you play it.
The other unusual angle of the game is the Power board. In the center of the board, there is a circular board that shows all of the possible winners of the political struggle, including appliances not in use in the game (e.g. below five players.) Each of those appliances has Power tokens in front of them, showing their current level of power in the grand scheme of things. Two of those appliances (or one and the Power supply) will be connected by the power cable. The person who wins a trick gains one Power for doing so. But the person who played the lowest value card into that trick gets to manipulate the Power board by first moving Power from one appliance to another and then moving one end of the cable so that the connection is different for the next trick. Why is this important? Because each player is dealt an Agenda card at the start of the game showing two of the appliances. You reveal your agenda at some point during the hand to show your prediction of which will have the most power and which will have the least power. You'll score points for making/having those predictions come true. Since you score one Power for each trick you win and gain whatever Power is in front of your appliance at the Power board at the end of each hand, you'll be scoring small or moderate amounts in each hand. But you're able to score large amounts by fulfilling your Agenda, since you conceivably can rack up 16 points by correctly predicting the highest/lowest scenario at the beginning of the hand by revealing what your Agenda is. That means others can work against you right away, but that scoring potential diminishes with each trick that passes that you haven't revealed it. If you get to 4 cards in hand or fewer, you can't reveal it until the end of the round and, unlike before where you could score for either prediction, waiting until the end mean you only score if you get both right. It's 14 points, but it's much more risk.
The object of the game is to be the first to score 40 points/Power. The "scoreboard" is represented by building a statue to represent your glory. The statues come in four pieces and each piece costs 10 points. When a statue is finished, the game ends and the person with the highest score (statue plus Power) wins.
There are a lot of trick-takers out there these days and the most appealing among them are those that do something that elevates them past the "win the trick with this little quirk" level. From Lovecraft Letter's self-destructive tendencies to Cat in the Box's joint shaping of reality to The Barracks Emperor's simultaneous winning of tricks for multiple players, those are the kinds of angles that I look for that will make those games stand out among the rest. Power Vacuum succeeds in this respect by forcing players to assess the game state while also trying to maximize their success. Switching the cable to benefit an opponent will benefit them, but also might work out just as well for you if it helps your Agenda to succeed. Similarly, knowing when to reveal that Agenda that will prevent opponents from taking advantage of your position while still extracting as many points as you can get from it is key in knowing how to win at this game. It's a very textured experience and, in that respect, has a bit of the Root problem in that it will absolutely function better with a group that is experienced at the game. Adding a new player or players into that mix may change the experience for those veterans to such an extent that it could get frustrating. But that is, of course, the result of many card games that depend on reading one's opponents like, say, bridge, most famous of the trick-takers, especially the contract version (like Power Vacuum's Agendae.) If you're playing stud poker, having someone at the table who isn't betting rationally can throw things off quite a bit. In the case of Power Vacuum, an inexperienced player not as well-versed in how to move the cable around might (ahem) short circuit the strategies of those who've played before.
But the best part about that situation is that the game plays in about half an hour, so it's really easy for people to become "experienced", since you could easily play four or five games of this in your standard gaming night. Plus, the presentation is every bit as entertaining as Roll, Camera! is (another Keen Bean production reviewed here.) Not only did they fully engage the appliance theme with Rempen's excellent artwork, but the wooden tokens are all lightning bolts and the Power cable and board are magnetized, so there's less worry about having the cable knocked loose in the course of outworking your rivals to the top of the food chain (Does the toaster have an advantage there...?) Power Vacuum has a learning curve, but it's a short one and the average gamer should be able to connect with this one quite easily.
