Untitled Card Game is a card game for two players, played on a 4 by 4 grid (or a 3 by3, 5 by 5, or 6 by 6 if you really want to go to town). There’s 44 cards (because that’s how many came in the little box of blank cards I bought years ago), each with 4 numbers on (all between 1 and 7, except on two cards, which have 0s and 8s on them), the sum of which always adds up to 16. No two cards are the same.
Players pick a hand at the start (8 cards each). All cards can be played in whatever rotation you want, so there’s no top/bottom, etc to any of them.
The first player plays their card somewhere on the 4 by 4 grid (not actually shown in the pictures, because I’d forgotten to draw a nice one), and puts a counter on it to show it is currently theirs (in this game we used various coins versus some black markers, but you can use what you want really, I suppose).
When the next player plays their card they have the chance to claim your card too, as long as the corresponding number on their card is higher than the one it’s been placed next to (if it’s next to multiple cards, you can claim as many of your opponents cards as yours can beat). You don’t have to place your card adjacent to any card that’s currently down, though, so you can stake out an empty corner of your own if you want. (Also, if you lay a card down with a number lower than the one it’s adjacent too, it doesn’t get beaten by the already played card.)
The winner at the end of the game is whoever has claimed the most cards on the grid. (If you play on an odd-numbered grid, the last player gets a bonus point to make up for them playing one card less during the game.)
All 44 cards can be seen in the picture below. You can leave out the two 0/8 cards if you want (they were mostly added so that my nieces/nephews could beat the 7s I kept laying down in the corners).
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Notes:
1. I made this on July 29th, 2024
2. Colouring in all these cards while watching the Olympics on my laptop
3. I never could come up with a good name for this.
4. My brother suggested 4 Square (because of all the fours in its construction, as noted above)
5. By I absolutely hated that name so it’s not called that at all.
6. Not now not ever
7. Maybe it should be called Quadruple Qriad, as it’s suspiciously similar to the Triple Triad card game from Final Fantasy 8
8. But you can’t prove a thing I never stole nothing (I did kind of steal something didn’t I?)
9. Anyway, originally I was going to use this box of blank cards to make a space themed game where you made a randomised solar system but I gaveup omn that idea because you could only have a seven by seven solar system really, and even then you couldn’t even have the four corners of the outer orbital circle.
10. And the sun at the centre had to be a bouncy ball.
11. While most of the cards would have needed to be completely black.
12. Also it wasn’t much fun (there was going to be a mechanic where it was easier to fly inwards toward the centre than it was outwards towards the oort, due to gravity, which just made the whole thing an absolute joyless chore).