Untitled Card Game (a card game)

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).

Kill The King! (a board game)

Kill The King is a board game for two players, played on a 9 by 9 grid, for maximum incompatability with chess/draughts. One player plays the King’s Guard (who start in a circle round the king), and the other plays the King Killers, who start in alternating squares all the way round the edge of the board. The king, meanwhile, does nothing but sit still in his spot at the centre of the board.

Players alternate goes, with the killers going first. The killers can move 1 space, the guards can move either 1 or 2. While both sets of pieces can move diagonally, the guards can’t move straight and then diagonally in the same go, just one or the other.

An opponent’s piece is defeated if you move your piece onto its square. The guards win if all the killers are killed, the killers win if the king is killed.

You can adjust the difficulty up or down between players by having the winning side start with one less piece in the rematch, or voluntarily start with less if you’re feeling sporting.

And that’s pretty much all the rules of the game.

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Notes:

1. I made this on 23rd December 2023
2. But these pictures were taken in September 2024
3. I stole the little pieces from Carcassonne
4. And largely stole the game itself from a half remembered description of some old norse board game I saw a description of at Sutton Hoo one time.
5. When I played it with my nieces and nephews last Christmas, we used chess pieces rather than Carcassonne pieces.
6. The killers used all 16 pawns, while the guards used a mixture of the remaining pieces as the guards.
7. (A king played the king)

Tales From The Town #191: In The Basement In The Bookshop

In the basement in the bookshop you could find: the science fiction books, the fantasy novels, the fairy tale collections, the folklore compendiums, pamphlets of poetry, artists’ manifestos, dissidents’ diaries, and the shelf full of sale items with torn covers and tattered spines. There was even a comfy old armchair, and occasionally a cat, but never, of course, anyone else at all.

Eleonora never told anyone this was where she spent every lunch hour, It was her own secret den, an oasis all to herself in the middle of an endless desert of days of despair.

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Notes:

1. Written on September 19th, 2024