Lonely Face

Posted: 2009 February 21 | Author: sean |

This week’s theme was to make a game on the theme of “loneliness.” Moses and I decided to try our hand at a card game, loosely ripping off Bejeweled in the process, focusing on the super-happy goal of reducing one’s loneliness by collecting pals (represented by collecting pairs of face cards, the main objective in the game). This is a game for two to four players, and takes approximately 15-20 minutes to play.

Supplies

• Two decks of standard playing cards, sans jokers, well-shuffled, or…
• One deck of standard playing cards, sans jokers, well-shuffled, and a fancy homemade 6-sided die, with pictures of suits on it: two Hearts, two Spades, one Club, one Diamond.

(Though the picture above features our fancy, homemade six-sided die, we realized after we were done playtesting that a second deck of cards would be much easier to acquire and use, and thus we use that in the description below.)

How To Play

Setup

One deck will be the main deck while the other deck will be the turn deck. Make sure both are shuffled, then take sixteen cards from the main deck and lay them out in a 4 x 4 grid, as below:

Give each player three cards from the main deck, and reserve the rest of the main deck for use in the rest of the game.

Place the turn deck in a pile, face-down, near the grid, but be careful not to get it mixed up with the main deck, as these cards are used for a very different purpose.

Play Sequence

First, to determine the start of the game, each player draws a card off the top of the turn deck. The player with the highest card goes first (draw again in case of a tie), and the order of play proceeds clockwise. To begin a turn, the player whose turn is up turns over the top card on the turn deck, and notes the suit (Heart, Spade, Club, or Diamond) on the turn deck. This suit becomes the “turn suit,” or the suit for this player to use in play for this particular turn.

Next, the player is required to do one of three actions with a card of the suit for this turn:

• Flip any card in the grid of the turn’s suit with any other card above, below, left or right of the card. For example, with the above grid, if the turn’s suit was a club, then one could flip the King of Clubs and the 10 of Hearts, as such:

  

  The rules for removing pairs (described below) can be followed after a flip.

• Swap any card in his or her hand with any card in the grid; the same rules follow if after a swap
• Pass one’s turn if no other play can be made.

If after choosing either of the first two options, the player is required to take any two face cards which (as a result of this move) have now been put next to one another above, below, left, or right of each other (so, the Queen of Diamonds and the King of Clubs in the above example) or any two cards of the same suit (such as the 10 of Diamonds and the Ace of Diamonds in the above example). The player cannot remove both pairs.

In the above example, the player would be allowed to only take one of these two new pairs — the face cards being preferable. The goal of the game is to acquire as many face card pairs as possible (which stand in for happy pals), as many Heart pairs as possible (less important than face card pairs, but still useful), and avoid Spade pairs.

Additionally, in case cards of matching suits or face cards are placed initially in the grid by one another or end up next to one another due to another player’s move, a player can simply remove them on his or her turn if they get a turn suit that will allow them to pick up the pair. That is, if the turn’s suit was Spades, the player could just remove the Six and Seven of Spades from the above grid outright (assume, basically, that the player flipped the two cards and then removed them).

Any cards removed from the grid are replaced from the main deck (the turn deck is only used to determine the turn suit) — if the turn deck runs out, simply reshuffle the turn deck and continue. More likely, however, as gameplay continues, the main deck will run out. After the main deck runs out, no cards can be replaced in the grid — these gaps will constrain the gameplay, as only cards present on the grid can be replaced by cards in players’ hands or flipped with other cards in the grid (you can’t flip a card with an empty space or swap with an empty space). This has implications for the endgame — players can potentially isolate single cards by removing the cards around them, thus making it impossible for another player to pair them up and remove them.

The game is over once an entire round of turns proceeds in which no player can make a move which removes a pair of cards.

Goal

The goal of the game is to end up with the highest point total at the end of the game. Scoring is simple:

• Each pair of face cards counts as 3 points
• Each pair of hearts counts as 1 point
• Each pair of spades counts as -1 point

At the end of the game, players total up their points. Whomever has the most points is thus least lonely (the most pairs of face cards and/or hearts), and therefore wins. In case of a tie, the player with the most number of pairs (face cards or suit pairs) wins. In case those tie, flip a coin to see who wins. If the coin lands on its edge, then all players should just give up and go home.

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