Saturday October 12, 2024 10:30 am to 2:30 pm

With Gemstone Gambit, we've attempted to give board game depth to a playing card game. It plays like a mix of Poker, Memory and Munchkin, except that nobody knows exactly how many points everyone is at (including, if their memory is bad, themselves). We've challenged ourselves to design a game using only playing cards and a printable/improvisable board. We wanted to make this game super accessible to other broke people, yet keep the complexity that makes modern board games fun. In Gemstone Gambit, your points are the face-down cards in front of you- diamonds are positive, everything else is negative. You play by doing one of 4 moves: drawing cards to your hand, placing a card to the table face-down, looking at any face-down card, or starting a battle. When you battle someone, you (or allies) play face-down cards from your hands against your opponent. When revealed, the highest sum wins. If the attacker wins, they can move a face-down card to/from their opponent, or steal cards from their hand. Otherwise, the defender can steal cards from the hand. The winner is whoever has the highest sum points when the last card is drawn. (Full/Formatted Rules here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cb-NeULfBaPD156gIiomi9QfhcOX0TV-z47VlVsEQyk/edit?usp=sharing) The game is reasonably easy to learn, but it has hidden depths in the shifting alliances, hidden information (face-down points, face-down battles) and social reasoning (stealing cards and guessing people's points from what people have said). We've found it quite addictive, and fun to play with both strategists and memers.

Collaboratory