Hi all,
Today I thought some more about pre-game customization, and somehow my mind wandered to an old card game named Bartok, which I learnt from a punch of Australians during one of the IOI-s I participated during high school and came up with a new simple card game based on drafting mechanics. Bartok was based on a simpler game, which English name I sadly do not know.
Basically the original game is that each player starts with 5 cards in hand, and there is one card in the middle. Then players take turns and put the same suit or same number/picture card on the top as the topmost card. If they cannot do that they take a card from the pile and skip their turn. Goal of the game is to get rid of your cards. In Bartok you have the additional 3 rules:
1) If you make a mistake, you are punished with 1 extra card.
2) Asking questions is a mistake
3) At the end of each game, winner makes 1 new rule.
Back in the day I enjoyed the game mostly because of the rule making, and the punishing aspect, it lead to ton of fun, especially if good rules were suggested, and people got more and more tired.
So today I had this idea for a similar card game, but using drafting mechanics, for now lets call it simply Draft, haven't thought of a better name for it so far. You only need a normal deck of 52 cards. Take jokers out. I play-tested it with a friend of mine and here's the final setting we ended up playing.
Rules for Draft:
Right now it's a 2 player game, it uses a standard 52 card deck. Game starts with deciding the beginner.
Both players are given 7 cards and 1 card is put in the center of the table, visible. The rest of the cards are not used during current game. In this game one of the main differences is that you don't get new cards, if you can't make a move, you lose.
From your 7 cards both players pick one card and give the rest to your opponent. They repeat the process until both players have picked 5 cards, the remaining 2 for each player are put away.
That ends the drafting part. Then you take turns and you have to put the same suit or the same card as the topmost card to the top. If you cannot play, you lose. If you play and that was your final card, you win the game. Of course if your opponent loses (cannot play) then you win the game.
At the end of each game the loser chooses who starts the next game.
Basically in this game, most of the game takes place in drafting, I'd actually say that drafting part is the game itself, and then there is an after-game, deciding the result. Of course the after-game is also important as there were lots of cases where there were paths of play for either player's victory, taking into account that there was a 1 card both players were unaware of.
For us drafting lasted at least 4-5 times longer than playing out the hand itself. Playing out sometimes lasted only 1 or 2 moves, but as we got more experienced, we managed to get usually to 4-5 or more moves.
At first we tried with drafting from 5 cards, so all cards were used up, it lead to too many games which ended first turn dead-end. Having the 2 extra cards really helped to make plans and gave each player more opportunities to outsmart your opponent.
So, what happens in the game, from a strategical point of view. Well, basically, while drafting you will want to be able to achieve a situation, where your opponent cannot play anything anymore, and you want to make sure that you are able to get to that situation. Notice that for the entire game, both players are unaware of only 1 card, guessing the card and noticing avoiding possible bad surprises is one key part of the play, the other one is, how do you make your hidden card count the most.
The game got even more interesting when we added the 3-rd clause of Bartok to the game. We configured it that if a player wins 2 consequent games, then he may do a new rule. Reason is, unlike in Bartok, in this game each new rule can make the game much more complex and deeper.
First rule we tried was that on top of diamonds you may also play higher clubs. Simply this rule made the higher clubs much more valuable, and lead to lots of new interesting situations.
Second rule was, that all 2-s could be put on top of anything, unlike in other games, this leads to a really overpowered 4 cards :D . They alone can be game-winners, but we didn't know that back then.
Finally we introduced a rule that you could play multiple of same cards (2 sixes or 3 kings for example) if one of them could be played, the legal one would have to be put on bottom and the rest could be put on top in any order. That was a game-changer as it made it much more possible to achieve the "I have no more cards" victory, even when you were not starting the game.
We didn't make more rules cos unlike Bartok, each rule made the game more complex from a strategic point of view (not just remembering the rules).
Also during first play-test, it seams that starter has an advantage, but not always, it is very situational, but weather you are the starter or you play second, you have to take that into account while drafting.
All in all, I think the game is a very good entry game for memory training and drafting games in general. Also it doesn't take long, so I think I will be using it as a filler for quite some time now. So far I can only advise to play it with 2 players, but I'll try to play it through at some point with 3 or 4 players as well and see what can be done there. Though I would start the play-testing with the rule that drafting goes counter-clockwise while playing starts clockwise. Also the player from the winners right will choose the starter for the next game.
Hope you enjoy it, and don't hesitate to comment or share your play-experience. Oh, and if you know the English name of the simple version, please let me know :)
Also, if you know of any card games that already uses this idea, I'd also be interested :)
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