I’m in crunch at the day job, and so I didn’t have weekends like I had hoped to work on a game project. Luckily, I had finished the design of this two-player card game, and it counts. I call it “Walls and Armies”, and the rules are below.
Setup:
Take a standard 52 card deck of cards. Remove the jokers from the deck and leave them out of the game.
Shuffle all cards into a main deck.
For each player:
- Determine how many “walls” and “army” cards you get. For each type,
- Flip the top card from the main deck to determine the number of cards to deal
- If it is a face card (Jack, Queen, King, Ace), then place that card down in front of the player face-up and sideways to indicate that it is a “shield”.
- If it is a number card, discard the card and deal the indicated number of cards face-down in front of the player. For example, if the top card was a 3, then discard the 3 and deal three cards.
- The wall cards and shield cards are laid out individually in front of the player. The army cards are placed in a deck, and the player should not look at them.
Play:
The first player is the one who has the fewest wall cards, or if tied, the one with fewest shields, or if tied again, the one with the fewest army cards. In case of a tie across all three sets of cards, flip a coin.
For each player:
- Pick one of the opponent’s wall or shield cards to attack, then flip the top card from your army deck. If the target card is face-down, flip it over to reveal it. You cannot attack wall cards until your opponent’s shield cards are eliminated.
- If your card is higher, then discard both the target card and the army card.
- Otherwise, your opponent can choose to leave it alone or counter-attack:
- If left alone, you may stack your next army card on top of any of your in-play army cards, adding the number of the armies together to attempt to eliminate the target card.
- Your opponent may choose to counter-attack by playing one of his/her own army cards.
- If the counter-attack is higher than your army card, then the counter-attack is discarded, and each of the stacked armies are added to the opponent’s wall cards.
- Otherwise, both the counter-attack and the stacked armies are discarded.
- Repeat until you run out of army cards.
- Replace all face-up shield and wall cards with face-down cards.
- Replenish your army deck by flipping the top card from the main deck. If it is a face card, add it to your shields. Otherwise, deal yourself the number of cards indicated into your army deck.
Play continues until either player has run out of wall cards. The other player is declared the winner.
One reply on “January #1GAM Entry: Walls and Armies”
Nice work! I’m so happy that we got so many non-digital games this month. Can’t wait to dive into categories and tags so we can have a “card game” only page etc. Keep up the awesome work.
Kind regards,
Christer Kaitila
@McFunkypants