Trump, Marker & Bid

I made a variant of an existing card game, thought you might find it interesting.

My mother says she heard this game before... I am pretty sure I first saw it in Bungo Stray Dogs, episode 29.

The rules of that game are:

1. Dealer deals top card of playing card deck, face up.
2. The opponent guesses if the next card is lower or higher. If he guesses wrong, the dealer gets to try.
3. Else, the opponent can try again.
4. Every guess is based on the previous card.

Winner is the player with the most correct guesses...So if you guess 'low' for a '9', and get '8', then you guessed correctly.

But, a king would be 'higher' than 9, leading to giving your turn back.

In playing with my mother, I recreated the game wrong, from memory. I thought the base card never changes, and every guess is subject to that.

In my version, if the top card is a '9', both players need to guess if the remainder cards drawn are higher or lower than 9. For the remainder of the game, 9 is the base, and doesn't change.

Probabilistically, most cards will be less than 9. As you see more cards, if you card count, you can adjust the math, too.

Rewatching that scene in the episode, I noticed that this game was played with the baseline shifting every card.

Thanks to my faulty memory, my game diverges from the above, bolded #4.

But it's a happy mistake, as you will soon see.

Needs

1x 52 card deck

2x jokers. Joker is wild.

Ace is low, kings are highest.

2 - 3 players.

Playtime is about 20 minutes or under. The game probably works with 4 players, but I didn't play it with 4.

How to Win

Score the most cards.

Cards are scored by guessing high or low correctly - keep that card with you.

Discarded cards don't count towards your score.

Trumping, Bidding and using Markers end with discarding your cards, for a minor advantage.

Setup

1. Dealer shuffles the deck, and places 1 card in the middle. This is the trump card.
2. Repeat step 1 until trump card is not a joker.
3. Dealer shows the next card to everyone, and makes sure they remember this card as the marker.
4. The marker card is shuffled back into the deck.
5. Game begins with the left of dealer, and continues until deck is empty.

How to Play

1. When it's your turn, you guess if the next card is higher or lower than the trump card.
2. Draw.
3. If you guessed correctly, this card goes into your score pile, and you continue guessing. (step 1).
4. If you were wrong, give the turn to the person on your left
5. Discard the card you guessed wrongly.

My Rules

1. Equal cards are correct guesses. As an example, if your guess is high, but the trump and drawn card, are the same in value, you continue guessing. 👍
2. If you draw the marker card, give it to a player of your choice, and continue playing if you guessed correctly before drawing.
3. Anyone can use the marker card at any time to stop someone's turn, and take their own turn. Play resumes to their left, once they are done.
4. Once used, discard the marker card...It doesn't count towards your score anymore.
5. If you draw the trump card, you have the option of exchanging the card in the center (the current trump card) with any previously discarded card. This is the new trump card, and is the baseline for the next guess.
6. If a player wants to stop (5) from happening, they can discard a card to make it so, which another player can negate by discarding a card from their own score pile, as many times as players want. This is like the 'nope' in Exploding kittens.

Algorithm Game ends when deck is empty.

F.A.Q.

If a marker card is used, some players turns might be skipped - my mother pointed this out....I used a marker card while she played, and the player to her left, my sister's turn, got skipped.

Variant Ideas

1. Here, the score is the number of cards. Add a rule where the score is the count of face values. This will mean a king is worth 13 aces.
2. Remove the trump rule, and follow the original version where the base shifts every draw. Keep the marker rule, though.

Interesting Notes

In a game, the joker itself was the marker card, which was already used once. Upon drawing the trump card in the game, Amma discarded the current trump card and replaced it with the joker (from the discard pile), making both marker and trump card the same.

That's technically legal, according to this variant. At that time, I gave the win to my mother, as I didn't expect that edge case at all.

Her argument was that if the joker was the trump card, then any card drawn would be either higher or lower, making this an automatic win, which made 100% sense.

After that I introduced the bid rule - that's rule #6. Players should not feel cheated out of a victory, so this bid counter-balances that edge case without removing the focus on luck.

When writing this up, I thought some more about a wild card being the marker....The rules do speak about this, and technically, my mother would not have won in a different interpretation.

Especially if we twist our mind a bit.

Here's why:

1. The joker is wild....so if the joker is any card, and the marker is joker, then, conversely, the marker is any card.
2. While this interpretation makes sense, this would mean that if a joker was the marker card, then you would give every card you score to someone else, since that's the rule for marker cards.
3. Plus, any one can interrupt any one, with any card if the marker is the joker.

This leads to an interesting situation where people actually want to play less, since these cards go to their opponent anyway. They will want cards to be given to them, for free.

In this interpretation, going back to my mother's argument, making the trump card a joker, is a bad idea if the marker is also a joker - because anyone can interrupt her flow with any card.

This shift is radical - it implies that an inverse relationship takes precedence.

That is, instead of saying 'joker' is marker, I am saying marker now has the properties of joker, as opposed to properties of something normal, like '6' or '10'.

In this interpretation, anything can be a marker, ending in a mockery of the entire game itself.

The joker did his job 🫨