- Counter Spell and Magic Mirror are cast directly from your hand and at any time during the turn (as a reaction to another wizard casting a spell).

- When players draw cards, they don't draw to replenish their hand, but instead redraw up to 2 cards (never exceeding the maximum 5).

This way, a player that casts Magic Mirror, will be left with a smaller hand next turn. I think this is a nice penalty for such a strong spell…

I still want to try these changes, but Counter Spell suddenly seems a bit too easy to cast. Also, what's the point of casting a powerful offensive spell if you can see your opponent has a a counterspell or magic mirror ready for use?

So, I'm thinking one solution to the whole problem is that Counter Spell and Magic Mirror are casted from your hand instead of from your spell sequence. This way you're not sure if your opponent will be able to stop your attacks and the player using them is basically hurting his future choices…

Another idea is to force players to choose their spells for the turn secretly (maybe by giving each player a card with the spell table where they put one or two tokens before revealing their card for the turn. The problem is that this adds a new component to the game…

I'll try to give all this options a go soon…

Forcing a player to cast the most powerful spell removes some of the options a player has, and it doesn't seem logical to force a player to cast a spell that won't have any effect on the target… at least if you have lots of suns and your target has resist fire, you have the option to cast a hit or an ice bolt, even if those would do less damage…

I guess the only solution is to force players to cast a spell… or maybe make counter spell and magic mirror special spells that aren't declared normally.

If you go the route of requiring a player to cast, then the opponent can still opt to use their Wyrm for a Hit rather than for a Fire Ball. A Hit isn't even a spell, so maybe it even cuts through a Magic Mirror.

You could avoid that problem by requiring players to use their Wyrm for the most powerful spell they could cast. That would create the odd situation (for example) in which you'd be forced to play a big fireball because you have lots of Sun runes at a time when your opponent has Resist Fire up and so will take no damage. I guess that would make Resist Fire more powerful, though.

I think Magic Mirror is great if you don't have many wyrms in your hand because you can use a wyrm in your Spell Sequence to damage your opponent as long as you have a moon and a knot available. It also makes attacking more risky, so a player having many wyrms doesn't have such a big advantage.

I also decided to simplify Resist Heat and Resist Cold because as they are always cast before any offensive spells, they should be able to stop them. Of course, this means that the current turn when they're played counts as one of the turns of the spell (you have to remove a token at the end of the current turn, unlike in spells like Invisivility or Haste that take effect next turn).

Feedback is welcomed

Then I thought that the game would be more interesting if it was longer, because you'd need more than a lucky start to finish your opponent, and the possibility of a recovery from initial attacks would be much higher. So we played a second game, this time with 12 HP.

This second game was much more interesting because we both had time to develop different strategies. I tried invisibility and some ice bolts while my gf threw some fire balls at me. It was all pretty balanced but then with 2 hastes in a row, she basically became accelerated for the rest of the game. I tried to heal and resist while launching the occasional ice bolt, but she was healing and throwing fire balls at me, one after the other. Then, with just 1 HP left I managed to make her forget all her runes (a three leaves amnesia spell) and I was hoping to play a big drain spell next, but she played a wyrm that even without any runes was enough to end the game with my defeat.

One thing that I didn't anticipate when writing the rules and happened tonight was that my amnesia spell was triggered before my gf was able to activate another Knot spell, but as I turned that card face down, her activation was canceled. It seemed the most logical thing to do, but I'll add a note in the rules just in case…

In principle I did like the idea of your hand of cards being your HPs, because it does limit your options as you get hurt, but in practice, it doesn't work that well… I'd like to find a system more like that one, but without the drawbacks :D

It occurs to me, though, that it makes Haste a kind of suicide. Haste might need to be changed a bit or replaced with a different spell.

Thanks!!

Here's another possibility: Divide the deck in half at the beginning of the game. Each half-deck is a draw pile for a separate player. When you take damage, discard the top card from your draw pile. First player to exhaust their draw pile loses.

Ace Trump was one of the first two games I invented for the Decktet, but I ultimately grew unhappy with it. The crosscutting suits made it very hard to tell how good your cards were, even ignoring trump. Knowing how good 8s or 9s are requires counting cards for almost every suit, which is just too much. If I lead a 9, for example, then there are two Crowns (one for each suit) that can beat it. An 8 can be topped by one or two 9s and two Crowns.

Moreover, it is possible for there to be ties. If someone leads a number card, two later players can follow suit with higher cards or the same rank - two Crowns, for example. So there had to be a rule for resolving ties, and I never found an elegant solution.

Recently, I played the game Xactika, which inspired this possibility: When a player leads a card, they pick one of its suits. Subsequent players must follow that specific suit if they can. The high card that follows suit wins (assuming no trumps are played). Trumps work as per Ace Trump, so it may still be possible to follow suit and trump in.

This makes 8s and 9s better. If I play a 9 (the Diplomat, say) I can call Moons and so there is only one Crown that can play over it.

This eliminates ties. Only one card at each rank can follow suit. (Except if Pawns or Courts are included, but I don't mind if the extended deck requires new rules.)

Any feedback would be welcome.

1. If the high bidder takes more tricks than they bid, they score their bid minus one for each overtrick. (This combines with the existing rules. A bidder who takes fewer tricks than they bid scores zero points. A bidder who takes exactly the number of tricks that they bid scores their bid plus a bonus of three.)

2. In a Bottom hand, Aces are considered high and Crowns are considered low. Number cards retain their usual order. So the order of cards in a Bottom hand would be: Crown,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,Ace (In a Top hand, Aces are low and Crowns are high.)

The first rule makes bidding a bit less risky by adding a margin for error. The second rule makes controlling the bid matter more, by increasing the difference between Top and Bottom hands.

Both of these rules need more playtesting. Feedback is welcome.

Can you draw a card even when you have one in your hand that you can play?

No.

At least, that's how I've played it. This means that you can be forced to play a card that will let your opponent go out, but it keeps things simple.

You are welcome to say yes and allow drawing at any time if you prefer, but it will make for a somewhat longer game.

(EDIT to add explanation)

With three possible ways to score (flushes, sets, and straights) there is some intense pattern matching involved. One player compared it to the game Set.

When you roll a 3 and have to add the ranks of the figures, do the crowns count as 10 or 0?

Crowns count as 10.

And additionally, if you roll an 1 and a 2, do you make a check for both items 1 and 2?

Check both.

And additionally, if you roll an 1 and a 2, do you make a check for both items 1 and 2?

Place a piece of a third color on the first space of each pawn card. These are crocodiles. At the end of each round of turns (after the last player has made their moves) all the crocodiles move one space forward, except if they're already at the third space on their pawn card. In that case they move back to the first space. If a crocodile moves on top of a from, the frog is sent back to the Excuse card.

We found that this added element which neither player can control and which changes the board (a bit like a third player would) also adds a bit of planning.

BTW, I see the problem of having 6 cards to take from in a game with 2 players. Maybe it'd be best to put either 5 or 7 cards so that each player gets to take the last one every other time….

When deplete the 6 cards of row of draw are extracted 6 new of the deck. If it exhausts the deck becomes to create one. So you can never stop.

I also believe that the strategy is deeper than Cartagena. The idea was to maintain the spirit of this game.

One problem we had was that she always ended up finishing the six available cards. This meant that she didn't have much choice in what to take, and I got my pick when new cards were dealt. This might not be a problem at all with more players, and it might have just been a fluke of this game.

I expected it to be like Cartegena with the Decktet, but there were aspects to it that I didn't expect. The interaction between suit symbols and card drafting makes for some interesting choices.

So a Pawn will score a minimum of 2 points (unlikely) and up to 5 points (if the player doesn't have an Ace of the suits in the Pawn)

As it is explained on the page, it's easy to create sections for other languages, so if anyone is translating games, be sure to add them to the wiki too, and to that page. Of course, feel free to ask any questions (here on the forum or by private message).

Edit: I've renamed the section to Pages in other languages because it should also include original content created in languages other than English. There is already one example of such a game: Revelacion

I only look at the top card when drawing three by three. Looking at all three cards would make the game easier, although it might induce option paralysis.

As with all solitaires, you are welcome to adopt whatever variant you prefer. Making the game easier might not be a bad thing.

And yet another question: when you draw the cards three by three, are you allowed to see all three cards, or only the top one?

Of course, the obvious would be a picture of the card, maybe a list of back-links to all the pages that link to them, etc…

A new rank card was introduced to the Extended Deck. This optional Courts rank is positioned between the Pawns and the Crowns and is composed of four cards with three suits each (just like the Pawns). The combinations of suits on these cards are the ones that don't appear on the regular deck.

These cards have not been released freely, so they're not really available at the moment unless you buy a decktet from P.D. Magnus (the designer).

More information from from P.D. Magnus can be found here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/390220

I like the modification to the Amnesia spell to counter the problem of a player not gettng enough wyrms.

About the timing change, I'm not that sure… I have to test is more…

See: Fifth Challenge

We then switched to Provincial, which is revised to involve one of my favorite game mechanics: simultaneous declaration.

It was good enough that we spent the rest of the evening playing it, and no one suggested we switch back to Western.

Some other stats: The highest winning hand all evening was 19 points. The second highest winning hand was 13 points, but that happened several times.

I have now updated the rules, and removed the warning that they're a work in progress. Karen says that if we get together for a third Terrapin night, that officially makes it a regular thing.

The discuss button is cool, but just too small and hard to notice, so I think it's not enough just by itself…

2. So I could, at the beginning of the game, page through the draw pile completely before I
really start my game.

3. Maybe this should be stated in the rules.

Anyway, thank you for the fast answer.

Yes, I think it would be useful to add the example to the rules.

2. Yes.

3. No.

In all those examples, there is only one instance of each suit, totaling 6 suits.

Can someone give me an example of a SET ?

Thanks !

For our second game we tried the "cards as hp" rule and the game was pretty quick (we didn't even reach the excuse around the middle of the deck). My gf attacked pretty quickly leaving me with less options for recovery. I did manage to heal a bit and counter-attack, but it wasn't enough. I gambled (went for a haste spell instead of healing) and she won. We started with 5 cards each, so that's just 5hp each. Maybe it'd be better to start with a bigger hand so a player is still in the game even after taking some damage.

The other aspect I'm really thinking about is the timing. Sometimes I think the game would be better if I would remove the moons-wyrms-knots casting order and just use the number on the cards. This coupled with a bigger hand gives more options for hand management as you not only have to think about which suits to keep and which to use, but also which cards are faster, which are slower. It also adds more value to the haste spell… I have to test it, because it's also nice to know you will always be able to heal before being attacked, but that also feels like an artificial restriction…

Edit: Ah! I forgot about something we both discussed and it might make it into the game: A possible solution to the problem of a player not getting enough wyrms is to modify the Amnesia spell so that instead of turning around cards in the opponent's spell sequence, you have also the option of just taking them. So, you get a choice of hindering your opponent (a couple of face down energy cards can be pretty bad) or hindering them less but in exchange getting a useful card for yourself. Instead of amnesia, I thought it could be called "Brain Drain" or something similar. If playing by the "cards as hp" rules, this would mean also discarding a card, else you'd gain HP in the process… I think it's a good bargain…

1. Do you place cards in the Tower and Resource pile in such a way that only the last card is visible, or are you allowed to see all cards that build the Tower and Resource piles ?
2. Is it allowed to turn over three more cards from the deck if the top most card of the draw pile could be placed either on a Resource pile or on the Tower ?
3. Is it allowed to move the highest card from the Tower to a Resource pile ? I.e. is the last card you placed on the Tower still available ?

I've renamed the Hidden category as "Special" and moved the Deleted Thread forum to a new hidden category so it does its purpose. This way, the "per page discussions" like comments on game pages remain visible in the forum and in the RSS feed, and the name of the forum is not confusing…

Or:

I just noticed that every game page has a "discuss" button at the bottom (on the same bar as the edit link).

Maybe it'd be best to completely remove the comments from a page instead of just hiding them, and let users click on the discuss buttom to go the the forum thread for that page. The cool thing about the "Discuss" button is that it shows the number of comments for that page.

Edit: Maybe we could keep the comments header and put a text saying "To post comments about this game click on 'discuss' on the bottom bar" or something similar

With comments as part of the page, someone wandering in and get confused when looking at games with short rules but long discussions about previous versions. Hiding the comments makes the game pages more useful as the place to go for rules.

That reminds me, do you think you could fix charm so that it can also dis-spell magic sword and magic armor? Both are very powerful spells, and charm would make sense. (Bear in mind, I'm thinking about your first spell list here. I don't even know if you still have any of those three spells.)

Edit: Noticed that you added a table for solo play. Very nice addition!

Another possible change is to make the Comments for each game page hidden by default. What do you all think of that one? It makes the game page look cleaner, but at the same time offers no indication of how many comments (if any) are there on that page, which bothers me a bit. Anyway, it's also true that new comments for games also appear at the forums and at the recent posts page and RSS feed, so it might not make much difference in usability…

Thoughts?

About the three cards, I'll think about it :) I may try it with 4 too if 5 is too much… I want to give a bit more control and options to the players, and 3 cards is just too few…

I hadn't even thought about team play. If you try, I'd like to hear how it goes. It seems moon spells should work within the team, not just each player. But introducing new spells is a problem because it requires the elimination of other spells…

BTW, now that I added "Counter Spell" I was thinking, instead of 1 special spell that is activated using three activation runes, I could add two more (depending on which of the runes actually activates the spell). This way I could maybe add magic mirror which is a cool spell :)

Solo Hex is a solitaire game I created a few weeks ago. As such, it needs play testing. you can find it in the all games list.

Also one suggestion. As a variant, when dealing with four or more players, perhaps make note of team play (IE: 2 wizards against 2 wizards, or 3 against 3. or any combination their of.) In this variant perhaps include new spells that work toward your partners. I know some of the current existing ones already allow this, and they would probably work very well. I'd have to test it.