A set of standard playing cards is a marvellous invention. I’ve played a ton of classic card games and now I design card games of my own. I went back to study the classics to become a better game designer. In this series of post I share what I have learned. First post here.
Fascinated and inspired, I decided to design a new game of my own that can be played with a standard set of playing cards. In this the last post of the series I present the game I came up with and share my reasoning behind the design choices made.
The idea
I started with the idea to see if I could create a version of Spooky Town that can be played with a standard deck of cards.
Spooky Town uses cards numbered 1-9 with the number of cards in the deck being the same as their number. So one Ones, two Twos, up to nine Nines. That’s 45 cards or 45 Monsters. I added 15 special cards called Blood to bring the number of cards in the deck to 60, a number divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. This is great for different player counts.
In Spooky Town each round you pick two out of five cards to play. Monsters go to your Posse, Blood to your Blood Pile. The combination of cards you play may have an additional effect like discarding or stealing a card from another player. I haven’t seen this in classic card games and I think this is fruitful ground to explore (this was a driver for me to study the classics — perhaps there is a game I didn’t know about that does something like this?).
In Spooky Town you claim Spooky Places by having the most Monsters of a given value in your Posse. Spooky Places are worth points at the end of the game but also grant you a special plower you can use during the game. While I could map the special powers to standard playing cards it didn’t feel right: To require players to memorise or look up powers in a table is not fun. It works in Spooky Town because you have the card with a bit of text on it to explain what you can do. Either the powers need to be super simple or not there at all. However, the reason you will want to claim a Spooky Place with a low end game score is because of its special power that you can use to score points elsewhere.
Also, taking out 1-10 in one suit for scoring left only 30 cards in the deck. But maybe you can use 1-10 in four suits to claim Kings, Queens and Jacks? As I explored the idea I could see design choices here that lead to the Reiner Knizia game Loot. The picture cards are merchant ships to be captured, Aces are pirate captions, the Admiral is a joker. But Loot makes use of custom cards so let’s not go in this direction.
In the end this is the game I came up with:
Moose Hunt
Swedes like to go hunting. They don’t talk a lot about it to not offend soft hearted city dwellers, but every autumn groups of green men with orange caps man little towers at the edge of the forest and take turns shooting at what comes out. Moose, deer, boar. So let’s make a game about hunting animals in the Swedish country side. If you prefer another theme, you can reskin the game to be about animals escaping from a zoo or bounty hunters chasing prisoners on the run.
In Sweden, the moose is the King of the Forest. There are four Kings in a set of playing cards. So let’s have the Kings be Moose, then the Queens can be deer and Jacks can be boars. Each turn a player reveals one animal, this gives a nice heartbeat to the game.
Players are the hunters who take turns taking shots at animals that appears. We want this to be competitive and sometimes an animal requires more than one shot to bring down.
So let’s use the cards 1-10 to represent shots fired. Players get a hand of say five cards that they can play to shoot at an animal. On their turn they either draw a card or they take a shot. You can shoot at an animal in front of you or in front of another player. You must match suit, sometimes you need to wait for the animal to move to a place where you can take the shot.
You can play as many cards from your hand you want but you can only take one shot per turn. Place the cards so they touch the animal you shoot at and from a line back toward you. When it’s your turn again, if you have the highest shot at an animal, you collect it. Keep the animal face up in your area and discard the shots fired. You collect an animal even if you are tied with another. To stop someone from scoring a kill, you must play cards that beats shots already fired. They can then shoot at the same animal again to try get the highest shot.
Aces are high as sometimes you get in that perfect shot. Let’s say an Ace beats all other cards played. Now, we don’t want this to be a game about drawing all the Aces so let’s add a joker: Joker beats Ace in any suit but Ace beats a joker that is played first. So you want to be a little careful with when you play your Ace. You can play the joker on any animal and will win the kill unless someone else plays the Ace.
Also, let’s not make this a game about drawing all the cards from the deck: If you wait too long, you loose out. Sun rises high in the sky and the animals hide in the forest. You can draw cards to improve your chances but risk that someone else shoots all the animals or the morning ends before you got a chance to play them. So let’s have players place the animals they reveal from the forest in front of them. If at the start of your turn there are no shots fired at the animal in front of you, you may discard it and draw another. This also means that you sometimes need to take a shot with a low card to stop another playing from discarding an animal they want to collect.
How does the game end? Two things can happen: The deck of animals run out or the deck of shots run out. When a player draws the last card in either deck the player gets their turn as normal. Each player then gets one last shot in turn, ending with the player who drew the last card. If they cannot or will not shoot, they may now pass. When the player who drew the last card has taken their shot or passed, the game ends. Players collect animals where they have the highest shot if any remains. They then count their scores.
Jacks are 2 points, Queens are 3 points, Kings are 4 points. In case of a tie, the player with the highest card in the prize suit (of those tied) wins.
Thoughts
I have tested with four players but the game should work also with 2, 3, and 5 players. The tie breaker rule is not perfect — in theory you can have games where two players are tied and have no cards in the prize suit. Also, revealing a card that is potentially a joker is fiddly. I considered other options, but I like that revealing a prize suit gives an incentive for the player holding the joker to save it for the King in that suit. Plus you get a little bit of information about the cards available.
Five cards is a good initial hand size. You will have dealt about half the cards so 50% chance that the joker sits on an initial player hand. If you don’t have it, odds are lower that another player has it so worth acing that king if you get the chance. With five cards odds are also decent that you have a card in each suit. With fewer players, the initial hand can be six or seven cards.
There is a good deal of juicy choices when playing the game: When to draw cards, when to shoot, which animal to shoot at. You win by taking chances at the right time, you lose if you play too safe.
Moose Hunt ended up not using the idea that the combination of two cards played can have an additional effect. Players also to not choose the cards to play at the same time and they don’t get a full new hand each round. So there are plenty of design space to explore still. Maybe I will create another game soon? But Moose Hunt feels complete. It’s simple and fun with enough juicy choices to be interesting and enough luck to avoid AP.
Happy to hear from you if you play it. Or if you know of a classic game where you play exactly two cards at the same time and the effect depends on the combination played. Happy gaming out there!