I'm backburning the name "Odd Ducks" at this point, the original idea that odd value cards were special for stocks doesn't make sense right now, so the working title has become EvenOdd.
Development Journey!
BIDDING
The same night I wrote the last post, I later realized that I could do away with the "shed-out bonus" cards and instead replaced them with a bidding phase after cards were dealt. The deck is made up of cards from 1-7, so I gave players 14 card hands, and we simultaneously picked one card to bid into the shed-out bonus pool. Just like I mentioned before, the player who bid the lowest card led first, and the player who bid the highest card would gain 2x those points if they shed out first, but instead lost that number of points if they didn't shed out first.
BREAKING TIES
The previous point led me to a problem. With cards valued 1-7, there WILL be tie situations. I decided to add tiebreaker numbers to each card so that they are all unique. This was originally done with dots under the cards like this:
The idea was that if two cards of the same value are bid, then the dots will break the tie to know which is higher or lower. I loved how these cards looked but wasn't sold on how easy they would be to parse.
BOMB BOONDOGGLE
From this point, I fell down a deep "bomb search" rabbit hole. I mentioned in the last post that I was quite interested in finding some way to add bombs to the game to add uncertainty and agency. The idea of a bomb is a meld that can be played outside of the led meld and one that is strictly stronger. I did come up with a great idea, in theory, and it involved finding essentially "straight flushes" inside the deck. If a set of cards had consecutively ascending dots, this would be a bomb with 3 or more, and a run of cards that had identical dots would also be a bomb. I was certainly worried it may be hard to parse these ideas, but figured if the mechanics worked well, then I'd figure out how to show it correctly later. I reached out to a good friend of mine who is far better at math than me, and he graciously built some simulations to determine the odds of finding these types of bombs at various player counts and bomb minimum lengths (3+ or 4+ cards for example). This is a visualization of the bomb types:
The results of my friend's math were quite interesting, but unfortunately, they didn't provide me with any kind of consistency. I was hoping to find a situation where the odds of a bomb with a 3p deck could be similar to that in a 4p deck, and thought I could likely get there by changing the minimum bomb length. In reality, based on my friend's simulation, the closest gap I could get between the 3p and 5p decks was around 20% which is way too big. I don't think the game will feel right if you have a 30% chance to get a bomb with 3p and only a 10% chance with 5p. I was disheartened by the results but also really happy to see them before I invested more time into this idea.BREAKING TIES AGAIN
Playtest! 11-1-22
I was able to get an impromptu playtest tonight with 3 players, and we played through 3 hands. The overall feedback was positive, both of my opponents not only enjoyed the even/odd low/high mechanic, but they also liked the tie-breaking with the second numbers on cards. I was worried this would feel clunky, but surprisingly it felt natural and simply worked well.
Slow it down
Nothing for the loser!
It felt a little odd that the last player with cards still got points. With the score setting phase, there are cards equal to the players, so you may get lots of points and never actually shed-out. This led me to explore the idea of removing one of the score cards so that there is no card for the last player, which means they score nothing for that round. They are intended to be shed-out bonuses, so why give it to a player who didn't shed out? This design space got me considering what to do with that last, lowest, score card and this led me directly into...
High revealer bonus instead of bet
Bring back betting!
- Once all score cards are revealed, and the high player takes the lowest score card as a potential bonus, that high player may choose to "double or nothing" that bonus score card. They do this before the low player leads the first hand. If the bonus card is a low value then that player may feel like they may as well bet, but of course they won't get much benefit either by doubling a small number. If it happens to be a higher value bonus card, then that incentive to try and double it could be interesting. I'm not sure if "double or nothing" is the right call, or if I should make it meaner and go with "double or lose points equal to the bonus". I imagine I'll test the tamer version first.
- Have all players be able to do a "double or nothing" bet before they play their first card. There could be betting tokens they could take to make it obvious, or they could just call it out like in Tichu. If they do this bet and go out first, then they gain double the points of that score card. If they do not go out first, then they still take the highest score card, but they flip it face down to show they gain no points for it due to busting. This may feel bad, since why work hard for inevitable 0 points, but it does deny those points from opponents, so hopefully they'd still be motivated to go out ASAP. The idea here is that multiple players could bet, which is always a fun time when it happens in other games like Tichu. This could be especially interesting to give multiple players "hail mary" options if they are far behind and want a way to potentially catch up even if they didn't reveal the highest score card for that round.