Odd Ducks? a quick design diary catching up to the present

I've had a new idea that I am quite excited about, currently called "Odd Ducks." The game originated during a playtest of a friend's game (Shreesh) and has blossomed from there. It started out with a single gimmick and now has two gimmicks, and below is a design diary that brings me to the present. I'll write a second post detailing the rules and options for the game as I currently see it.

Gimmick #1: Odds & Evens for Ups & Downs

This is where the game first started, and it's a straight-up modification of a key part of Shreesh's design. Their game was a dominos shedder that had 1, 2, & 3 card melds (runs and sets), and when the meld was size 1 or 2, the LOWER the card was, the stronger it was. With 3 card melds, the higher the value, the stronger, and that is where their game sits. Days after playtesting, I asked them, "have you tried this with single-value cards instead of dominos? And have you considered what if odd meld sizes are high = strong whereas even meld sizes are low = strong?" Their response was something like, "I haven't tried single-value cards, and the odd/even idea sounds great to me." These ideas didn't really work for their dominos-based shedder, and at that moment, I decided to see if I could design my own game with this as the core principle. 

Through a couple playtests, the following hasn't changed one bit:

Legal Melds

• 1 or more cards of the same value
• 2 or more cards that are a consecutive run

Meld Strength

• Odd meld size = Higher is stronger
• Even meld size = Lower is stronger

The main reason I am really enjoying this gimmick is that it makes high and low values potentially strong. So far, I've found the puzzle of getting through my hands to be fascinating (if not occasionally confusing). 

Gimmick #2: Cards as Stocks

As I continued to mull through Gimmick #1, a concern popped into my head early. What if someone gets really lucky and they simply play all their cards fast? This is a shedding game where playing cards is the key, how do I deal with this? My first answer to this came through the lens of the game Tichu, and that was partnerships. If someone gets a really lucky hand, well maybe their partner didn't, and they have to figure it out as a team. I considered team-based play for a while, but the concern of player count restriction loomed large. This led me to wonder, what about organic teams? Where your partner changes each round. Or what if you can partner with someone who ISN'T partnered back with you? This is where I started to get some traction. 

Quickly the core idea of Gimmick #2 emerged, what if players had one or two cards that were their color, and these cards can be played into tricks and won by various players. Then those cards will be worth points that are variable depending on when the matching player shed out all their cards! 

The first iteration of this idea involved giving each player 2 cards in their color that where faceup on the table, one says "odd" the other says "even" and they are flexible wild cards that must match their restriction when played onto the table. I quickly realized, before playtesting, that this was simply way too powerful and players would likely almost always win a hand with them which means they'd always take their own stocks. 

Just 30 minutes before my first real playtest, I came up with a new idea. Lets make these 2 faceup cards value 7 and 8, respectively. These are the "weakest" values in a deck (at the time the deck was 1-14 x player count) since they are right in the middle and won't be hugely impactful for even or odd sized melds. The first playtest was done using this rule and overall it "worked", though it quickly became obvious that (especially at lower player counts) it was still very easy to toss the 7 and 8 together into a big run that was unlikely to be beaten. We quickly adopted a 4-card meld limit which worked well enough, but I hate arbitrary limits like this and knew I needed to come up with something different.

I spent a bunch of time considering this, briefly thinking about making the player colors the highest and lowest number possible, but the issue of easily winning your own stocks was still around.

Then I had a big new idea: Why not just shuffle the deck together so that you aren't guaranteed to have your own stocks in hand? From this I quickly iterated to adding "black" stocks into the deck that score points for the player based on the point value the player gets for shedding out. So if they are first, their black stocks may be worth 3 points each, but if they are last then their black stocks would be -1 points each, etc. I made the deck smaller, now 1-13, and made the middle card 7's into these black stocks. I the 4s and 10s became player-specific stocks and this is how the game was for the second playtest session.

By and large that session went very well, though the testers did mention an interest in being able to manipulate the shed-out values for the players as well as possibly being able to convey some information about player hand strength earlier in the round to help guide stock-aquisition decisions. 

Since the second playtest I've thought a bunch more and decided I want to try increasing the number of black stocks, from 1 to 3 per player set. I then pushed the player stock values to 3 and 11, and realized all the "power" cards are odd. Thus "Odd Ducks" the name was born, we'll see how long it sticks!