New Rule

Introduction: There’s cold… and then there’s cold. Working in the bitterest of temperatures is its own special torture, but the slow thaw when you get back into the warmth is a delicious feeling. One might even consider it worth the trouble! In Twenty Below, players compete to glean the most warmth from a slowly thawing deck. As each turn passes the draw pile melts a bit more, offering new spoils for the quick player to claim.

Players: 4

Materials: One standard deck of playing cards.

Setting Up: Shuffle the deck and deal five cards to each player. Arrange the remainder into a play board as follows: place nine cards in a pile in the center and distribute the rest into two concentric rings around it, following a grid pattern such that the first ring has eight cards and the second ring has sixteen. When revealing cards, designate a corner card from the outer ring as the first card to thaw, and continue the sequence in clockwise order from outer to inner ring. Designate a first player; play proceeds to the left.

How to Play: Players take turns thawing the play board and using the revealed cards to gather points. On their turn, each player first thaws (reveals) the next card in sequence on the play board. If the card is warm (see below), immediately thaw the indicated number of cards before continuing. Note: only thaw more cards if the first revealed card is warm! If the first card is warm, subsequent revealed warm cards on this turn, whether from the hand or from the board, do not cause more cards to thaw. If the first card is not warm, players may play a warm card from their hand if they choose to continue to thaw. When the player is finished thawing, they collect points as they are able before concluding their turn.

Warm Cards: all red-suited cards are considered warm — hearts and diamonds. Hearts cause one additional card to be thawed, and diamonds cause two additional cards to be thawed.

Collecting Points: A player may collect points by acquiring any revealed warm card on the play board. Only warm cards are worth points; players acquire these by playing cards — from their hand, from the board, or in combination — that add up to the value of the warm card they wish to collect (all face cards are worth ten, aces are worth one). The following rules apply:

• Any number of cards, of any type, may be used to acquire a warm card, but all cold cards (black-suited cards) used in this way are discarded.
• Warm cards already in play used to acquire new warm cards remain in play wherever they currently lie.
• Warm cards played from a player’s hand to acquire a new warm card are added to the play board: place these in gaps left by discarded or acquired cards. Any gap will do — including the gap left by the newly collected warm card. If no gaps are available, discard the card instead.

Thawing the Core: The player that thaws the last card can, if they are able, play one more warm card to thaw the core, allowing them to collect the pile of nine cards at the center of the board. If the player is unable or unwilling to thaw the core, it remains frozen and the opportunity passes to the next player in order.

Winning the Game: When all cards have been thawed, including the core, each player tabulates their points: all warm cards are worth their value in points, cold cards are worth zero. The player with the most points wins.

Next: Designing “Twenty Below:”

This game began with a reflection on the mechanics of two of my other games, Quisquilian and Bleeder. The former involves a large play board of many cards, and the latter a slow reveal of the whole deck. I merged these two into a single mechanic and reoriented the dispersal such that all cards are played face-down and slowly revealed, rather than all cards dealt and slowly played. The idea was for a dynamic based on timing and opportunism: playing a warm card to thaw at the right time could mean a big reward, but so could hoarding cards and waiting on other players to throw in their valuable cards before pouncing. Players much gauge the cards shown against the cards remaining and try to predict what is likely to emerge.

Almost as an accident I tied the thawing power to point collection, so that thawing becomes an instance of strategic sacrifice: players must lose points in order to thaw more of the deck and increase their potential to gain points. With fully 50% of the cards on the board worth points, I’m hoping the incentive is great enough to make this choice meaningful, though that will have to be revealed by playtesting.

The final uncertain mechanic is the discarding of cold cards versus the retention of warm cards. It remains to be seen if keeping warm cards on the table overloads the point pool and makes it too easy to collect other warm cards. However, it could easily be prototyped by simply implementing the discard rule for both. If anyone should give this one a try, please try it both ways and tell me how it turns out.

Tags: Game Design //