A card game for 2 or 3 players, © by Bill de Veas, 2020-04-11, last revised 2020-06-09
A game of collecting cards through math operations.
Designed for 2 or 3 players. A variant for 4 to 5 players is also available.
This game uses a standard French-suited card deck (52 cards, no Jokers).
Extract the 12 court cards from the deck and set them in the center. These are operators.
Shuffle the rest of the deck, which contains just the pip cards. Deal 13 cards to each player. These are numbers.
Leave the remaining card somewhere prominent, face-down, as the numbers discard pile.
Number card values are their pip count; Ace is worth 1.
The object is to collect the most operator cards.
There are 12 operator cards, to be awarded in 2 sets of 6 rounds.
To start a round, reveal the top card from the operator deck.
Each player then chooses 2 number cards from their hand, either to bid on the operator card (by attempting to best match the goal conditions), or to slough (by playing cards that they don't expect will win).
The goal and the means to get there are defined by the color and rank of the operator card.
The color of the operator card determines whether to go high or low:
The rank of the operator card defines what players do to their two number cards to arrive at their resulting value:
So, for example, a red King means that the goal is to have the lowest sum of the two numbers, while the goal for a black Queen is to have the largest remainder after dividing the two numbers, and the goal for a black Jack is to have the largest difference between the two numbers.
Players lay their chosen cards face-down in front of them to indicate they're ready to continue.
When every player is ready, all players reveal their 2 cards simultaneously, then each player announces their resulting value and, if necessary, describes how they arrived at it. For example, for (5 mod 2), they could say, "2 into 5 leaves 1".
The player* whose cards best matched the goal collects the operator card. Move all played number cards face-down to the discard pile, and continue to the next round.
*In case of a tie for the win:
When the first 6 operator cards have been claimed, gather any remaining cards from each player into the numbers discard pile; shuffle that, deal 13 more number cards to each player, then repeat the above for the remaining 6 operator cards.
When all 12 rounds have been played, whoever has claimed the most operator cards wins the game.
At the end of a game, first place scores 2 points, and second place scores 1 point.
Play to an agreed-upon number of points, such as 10.
For 4 players, deal 9 number cards to each player, and do 3 sets of 4 rounds.
For 5 players, deal 8 number cards instead; each 4th round will always just be the last 2 cards in the players' hands.
Q: Can you allow for subtracting the larger number from the smaller to arrive at a negative number? When faced with a Red Jack, it would be nice to be able to play (Ace minus 10) for -9 which is "lower" than (10 minus Ace) for +9.
A: No. The Jacks are interested in the absolute amount of difference, so the number's sign is irrelevant. (10-1=9), and (1-10=-9), but the difference between them is 9 either way.
2020-04-29: Changed how to resolve ties between all players.
2020-05-05: Jacks were Min or Max, but are now all Minus.
2020-05-16: How to break last-round ties with the 13th card.
2020-06-09: How to handle (n) consecutive ties for (n) players.