anthony mattox new media art & design

A Card Game

One of my recent assignments in one of my classes was to develop a card game. Not surpisingly, this wasn’t an easy task. The game was to be for two or more players and had to involve a deck of cards and one other object.

I didn’t come up with a good name for the game I came up with, but I think it’s half decent, especially given a week to create it.

To play the game you’ll need a deck of cards and a set of tokens for each player. The tokens are used to mark which player controls a card. These could be poker chips, beads, coins, or anything else. You may need up to 25 per player.

Give it a try and let me know how it is or if any of the rules are confusing.

Setup:

25 cards are placed in a five by five grid from a shuffled deck of playing cards, each player is dealt four cards, and the rest of the deck is placed face down. Each player picks a color of game pieces

Goal:

Players compete to control more cards than their opponents by the end of the game.

Rules:

• Players take turns and try to control as much of the grid as possible.
• Each turn a player has three options.
  • Switch two adjacent cards on the board, vertically or horizontally.
  • Replace a card in the grid with one from their hand. The initial card is placed in a discard pile or left underneath the new card. The player picks up a card from the deck to keep four cards in their hand.
  • Pick up a new card from the deck and discard one from their hand.

  

• If a player makes a set of three or more cards in a row they place their pieces onto those cards. A set includes cards of the same number or consecutive cards of any suit.
  
  
• After a card has been claimed by a player it is frozen and can not be moved or replaced except by a higher card which completes a set.
• If someone replaces a card in a set with a higher number card, creating their own set, the rest of the initial set still belongs to the player who created it, but the replaced card is now controlled by the other player.
• If a card within a set is included in another players set that card is claimed by that player regardless of the sets value.
• If a player extends a set (e.g. from three to four cards) the whole set belongs that player.
• When there are no more cards in the deck, each player takes one additional turn and the game ends.
• The player with the most cards claimed at the end of the game wins.

I also made a graphic (full-size image) of the better part of the game with some brief explanations. It might make things a little clearer.