New Rule

Introduction: A prudent player is always one who calculates the odds and takes advantage of temporary fortune, but there’s always a calculated risk. As any poker player will say, you can’t play it safe all the time. In Fysigunkus, discipline and keen perception will take the day as players wrestle with their innate curiosity and gambling instinct in their race to conquer the deck.

Players: 2-8

Materials: One standard deck of playing cards. If more than 4 players are playing, use two decks shuffled together.

Setting Up: Shuffle the deck and deal nine cards to each player, setting aside the remainder into a draw pile. Designate a first player; play proceeds to the left.

How to Play: The objective of Fysigunkus is to acquire a majority of the cards in the deck. At the beginning of each turn, the player to the left of the active player draws the top card from the draw pile and reveals it. The active player has the option to buy this card, or to pass and try their luck on a different, more expensive draw. Players pay for a card from the draw pile by discarding a certain number of cards (of their choice) from their hand, based on the following sequence:

• If the player wants the first card, he or she pays one card to the discard pile and takes the new card into their hand.
• If they decline the first card, a new card is drawn and placed next to it. The player may elect to purchase this card for two discarded cards, or they may pass and see a third and final card.
• If the player passes twice and a third card is drawn, they must purchase this card for the cost of three discarded cards.
• Once a card is passed, it is considered dead and may not be purchased this turn. Thus, if a player passes the first card, they must purchase either the second or third card—the card they have passed is no longer available.

After a player has purchased a card, they may play pairs from their hand as they choose, laying it face-up in front of them. For the remainder of the round, any card that is offered to them for purchase may be acquired for free if it matches a played pair. In this event, the card is instantly added to their pair and a new card is drawn for the purchase option. Cards may also be added to threes-of-a-kind in this way.

Keep What You Earn: Each round continues until one player runs out of cards; whenever the draw pile is depleted, shuffle and re-use the discard pile. At the end of the round, each player keeps one card from each three-of-a-kind and two cards from each four-of-a-kind they possess: these cards form their hand for the next round. There is no hand maximum, but each player must have at least nine cards; if they did not retain enough from the previous round, deal new cards from the shuffled deck to refill their hand to nine.

Winning the Game: If after any round a player retains enough cards to form a hand of twenty-two cards (or more), they win the game.

Next: Designing “Fysigunkus:”

This game is the fourth “Grandiloquent Game” I’ve created, based on a word and premise not too dissimilar from my earlier design, Kirkbuzzer: pushing your luck and taking calculated risks. The specific definition:

fysigunkus - A person who lacks curiosity.

Approached from rather the opposite perspective, the game attempts to induce players to suppress their natural curiosity and act with discipline and reserve. This is appropriate, since the concept of the three-step draw and purchase is based on a mechanic from a variation of poker, called Wrinkle Dog (maybe… my memory for the names of the innumerable poker variants in my head isn’t as good as it is for the rules), and poker is all about taking smart risks. In that game, players pay chips to the pot to buy different cards to form a seven-card-stud hand.

The purchase mechanic fits here because it offers players the opportunity to push their luck, similar to the way it was done in Kirkbuzzer, but with a different tactical balance. In this game, the costs of pushing for new cards hurts you in terms of discard rates (you’ll always pay something, no matter what you decide), but it can also be wielded as a tactical maneuver by drawing out and burying cards that might’ve helped your opponents. You can also deliberately take a loss on discards to try to force the round to end quickly, if your opponent is acquiring lots of sets and you want to limit his hold-over count.

That card hold-over rule is an intriguing experiment, one I am eager to see tested and critiqued. There’s now an incentive to sacrifice short-term success for long term gain, as players shed cards in order to uncover the ones that will build on their pairs and go into their future hands, laying a foundation for a strong starting position in later rounds. I tried to balance it by limiting the hold-over to two per rank, so that a crafty player can still grab up the two leftovers and hoard them for a round, depriving they opponent of a three- or four-of-a-kind and preventing them from holding any of those over again: a small but real chance to turn the tables that is essential to ensure that losing players are not beaten before the game actually ends. Twenty-two is set as the win condition since that is the most a player can have while still ensuring three other hands of nine and a draw pile of three can be formed.

Otherwise, the game is fairly simple. The set collection objective remains a fixture, indelibly fused with any playing card game, but I don’t see that as a detriment. Playing cards are a carefully balanced set best employed in the pursuit of set collection as it provided the best manifestation of the particular odds of a 52-card shuffle. I am eager to see how this one stacks up against similar designs like Kirkbuzzer and Quisquilian

Tags: Game Design //