New Rule

Introduction: When you leap out of a plane, you can’t delay in opening that chute or you’ll find it’s too late when you do! Players work together to spread the deck across the table as fast as possible before their score dwindles to nothing. This is a game about active cooperation. Much like a communal solitaire game, players combine their efforts to defeat the shuffle as quickly as possible, and teamwork is not only encouraged, it is rewarded—the most courteous, helpful person is the winner!

Players: 3-8

Materials: One standard deck of playing cards. If more than five players are playing, use two decks shuffled together.

Setting Up: Shuffle and cut the deck, then draw the top card and lay it in the center, face-up. Deal five cards to each player, setting aside the remainder into a draw pile. A first player is designated and play proceeds to the left.

How to Play: The objective of the game is to get all the cards onto the table, face-up. At the start of their turn, players refill their hand to five cards from the draw pile. Then, beginning with the center card, players may lay cards from their hand that are one rank higher or lower than the value of the card showing, continuing in a train as far as they are able. Players may also create forks and play on them, as described below:

Creating Forks: If a player has more than one of card of a certain value that is playable on their turn, they may play these cards side-by-side on the train’s head card. This creates a fork, and new trains may be formed from either of the newly played cards. Player may create a single fork with as many as four branches, if they have all four cards of the relevant rank in their hand.

Playing Nice: This game is scored in an unusual fashion: the group starts each round with 100 points. For every turn it takes, beyond one, for the group to clear their cards, subtract 10 points from that amount (to a minimum of zero). The number that remains when all cards are played is the base score—at the end of the round, all players gain this value in points. In addition to this number, players can score individual points by playing nice, as follows: On their turn, in addition to playing the cards in their own hand, the active player may request assisstance from the others. If a passive player wishes and they have a playable card, they may play it on the head card of their choice. For each card played in assistance, the active and assisting players each gain 2 points. Each passive player may only play one assistance card per turn.

Winning the Game: Players may designate a set number of rounds at the start of the game as they see fit. When all rounds have been played, the player with the highest score wins.

• Alternative Rules: Players may wish to modify the “Playing Nice” rule such that assistance cards benefit all, not just the two involved. In this case, the win conditions are simply to achieve the highest score possible within the set number of rounds.

Next: Designing “Parachute”
In the previous post I discussed an article on Yehuda’s blog about Miss Manners, and challenged myself to create a game based on good manners for this Sunday’s design. In retrospect… it was a very difficult endeavor. As I noted in that post, games are singularly competitive environments: ones that promote the purest kind of self-centered, ruthless cruelty. Manners are not at home here. With most of my other designs I could start with a premise or a genre, but with this design I began with the aesthetic of “courtesy,” and no obvious mechanics sprang to mind.

The game needed to promote cooperation, obviously, because a field of rivals would be ill-served by making concessions to their opponents. The game needed to promote information sharing and self-sacrifice—again, not something suited to a traditional atmosphere of competitive play. I toyed with a number of ideas including party and social games (a la Charades or my earlier attempt, Paedocracy), but those did little to make politeness part of the game. People will be polite players if their nature is polite already, and this game needed to incentivize politeness in players who otherwise might have no use for it. Thus, the core mechanic needed to be one that gave tangible rewards and individual advancement for being a nice person.

I had already decided the game had to be cooperative, so I built on a mechanic from a classic variation of dominoes, Mexican Train, and altered it to be a group activity: all players are able to play on all trains at all times, but limited to the cards in their hand. All cards are dealt at the start, so every spread must eventually finish. Much like in Solitaire, the obstacle is to finish it as quickly as possible via a fortunate deal and prudent card placement.

But just having players all play on the same spread wasn’t enough: I needed a way to inspire players to talk to each other if they were going to demonstrate courtesy, and that meant the topic of conversation needed to be “nudged” a bit. Asking for and receiving help is an activity rarely accomplished without being polite, so it seemed a natural fit. If players were incentivized to ask for help on their turn, and if other players had good reason to give it, it might just produce the atmosphere I sought. I limited the scope of the players’ ability to assist to keep some challenge in the game, defined a simple scoring system, and wrote it up.

Of all the designs I’ve done on this blog, this one is the one I am least certain of. I would be amazed to hear of any other game that attempts to hardwire politeness into the dynamics like this, and I have no trouble understanding why that is. This game may be a total failure—it may be completely unable to foster good manners in the players and be boring on top of it—but I feel it was a valiant effort and a worthy cause. Pushing the envelope is always worth at least a good try

Tags: Game Design //