Card game of hidden information and structured communication
This is a game of hidden information, structured communication and cooperation. To play you will need a standard deck of playing cards. The game is a modified version of Hanabi which is played with a custom deck of cards and tokens.
How to play
Remove aces and 2s from the deck. Place aces in a pile, face up. These are the information tokens, a form of in-game currency.
Place the 2s in a line at the center of the play space. All cards will be played on top of the 2s.
Shuffle the remaining cards. Deal each player (up-to 5 players) 5 cards, face down.
Once everyone has cards, lift cards. A player cannot ever look at their own hand! Players hold their cards so that all other players can see them, but so they cannot see their own cards.
Players now go around the circle, building ascending piles of cards by suit, starting from 2 working up.
During a turn a player can take 1 of 3 actions:
- Take an ace (information token) and use it to tell another player something about their hand
- A player may only reveal information about suit or number. E.g., they can indicate that another player has 2 spades or may indicate that a player has 3 3s.
- After revealing information the ace is discarded and is unusable until it is reactivated.
- Discard a card from their own hand, reactivating a previously discarded ace for another player to use.
- Play a card onto the play piles.
A player must always have 5 cards in their hand. After playing a card, or discarding a card, a player draws another card from the remainder of the deck.
Cards that have been discarded to reactive an ace cannot be played and are removed from the game space.
If the draw pile is empty, continue playing until either everyone runs out of cards, or no moves can be made. Play is over when no moves can be made.
The game has a soft win-state, where you determine by how much the group won by how many piles they successfully create, 2 - king.