Introduction: In most card games, players often need do little more than keep an eye out for making sets from matching suits and numbers. But in Buried Alive, the cards take on a whole new dimension: the board is formed and points won from the design and spatial layout of the cards, not from the the values. Clever timing and card prediction will decide the winner in this unusual variation.

Players: 2-8

Materials: One standard deck of playing cards.

Setting Up: Shuffle the deck and deal all cards into equal hands per the number of players. Leftover cards are set aside to be counted during the scoring phase. Designate a first player; play proceeds to the left.

How to Play: Each turn, players play cards into a communal play board, competing to keep their own cards exposed while covering up the cards of their opponents. At the beginning of the round, players examine the cards in their hand. The suit with the highest representation among their cards is their home suit – their secret objective for the round. Beginning with the first player, players select a card from their hand and lay it on the board. Their goal is the maximize the exposure of the suit icons on the cards of their home suit, and minimize the exposure of all other suits.

Suit Icons? Suit icons are the symbols or “pips” of the suit found on each card in a quantity equivalent to the card’s value (e.g. The 10 of Diamonds has ten diamond-shaped symbols on its face, not counting the corners). When a card is laid face up, all its icons are exposed until another player plays a card that overlaps it (see below).

Play and Overlapping: Players encroach on and minimize the exposure of their opponents’ cards by playing cards that overlap them in whole or in part. Each card may overlap any number of cards as long as it does not cover more icons than it’s face value.

For example: A Ten and a Four are showing on the board, for a total of thirteen visible suit icons. The active player selects a Seven from his hand: he may play it anywhere on the board, covering suit icons from the Ten or the Four or both, so long as it does not cover more than seven suit icons. This means he could completely cover the Four, or partially cover the Ten, or cover a section of both if they are close together. Still confused? See the diagram.

Cards are always played in a grid orientation so that their edges are parallel — diagonal placement is not allowed. Partial coverage of icons does not count either for points or in determining valid placement of an overlap. Aces count as one, and the entire icon on the Ace of Spades must be covered to eliminate it. Face cards are considered wild — they may cover any number of icons, but they are worth no points and they may be overlapped to any extent any other card.

Winning the Game: Play continues until all players’ hands are expended. For every suit icon still visible, the player(s) targeting that suit gain one point. If there are leftover cards remaining from the initial deal, reveal them now: divide the number of icons they show by half and award the value as points to the relevant player. The player or players with the most points wins. Alternatively, a game can be scored by multiple rounds (recommendation: eight). Ties are allowed.

Next: Designing “Buried Alive”:

With twelve card games to my credit in the Simple Sundays project, not to mention hundreds of pre-existing card games, it has become increasingly difficult to conceive new variations on the theme. Fairly soon, I feel, I will need to move on and explore some other genre… but before I do, I wanted to try to make a game that really looks at cards from a fresh perspective.

With this game, I began by throwing out all the convention of card play and trying to think about the actual objects that are playing cards, and the properties they contain that could be used in a game. I recalled many games of Euchre from my Midwest hometown, and the curious custom of using the Fives as the scoreboard. One five is laid face-down over another, and as the team gains points, the covered Five’s pips are revealed to equal their score. When the team reaches five points, the top Five is flipped and the reveal started over, counting from six to ten. I was intrigued by the use of the spatial, graphic properties of the cards as a mechanic, and so I took that and ran with it.

My first thought was a game not far dissimilar from Twenty Below, where cards are laid out at the beginning and slowly revealed, except this time it would be the symbols that emerge, pip by pip. It was immediately obvious that this would lend itself to inadvertent cheating, as the merest slip of the hand when dealing could give away the value of the hidden cards well before their time. However, the reverse of this mechanic — one in which players play cards face up and slowly conceal the cards on board — became apparent the instant its predecessor died.

In the new mechanic, players play cards to obscure the pips of the cards already played. A point system based on visible icons emerged organically from this, and the convention of dealing the entire deck at the outset was a similarly natural fit. The rule by which leftover cards are counted in as half at the end is an experiment: the intent was to provide some balance between the unfairness of just awarding points to the lucky player with the mismatched suit, and the unfairness of denying them the opportunity to make those points count by having the cards available to play. Scoring at half was a knee-jerk reaction — we shall see if it proves to be a game-breaker.

In conclusion, I am very excited about testing this idea out. I think the use of the cards in this way could prove genuinely innovative… and challenging as well! I know a number of you have enjoyed playing a few of my games in the past, so please: give this one a try and let me know how it turns out. I am eager to see my theory put to the test!