Oops, I think Odd Ducks is two games.

 Had a great single-hand playtest today, tried a "kitchen sink" game where I threw all the ideas from previous tests together. The stocks were increased, and on every even card, and every odd card changed the stock price of the player who won the trick. It worked well enough, but the stocks we had at the end of the hand felt kind of random and secondary to the decisions we were making. This was also the first test with wild cards (2 per player), and those worked well enough. In the discussion after, the main point was "there was too much going on, lots of good ideas though." I wasn't surprised by this, in a way, this test was me intentionally testing how much I could throw in, and I think it was too much.

2 Weird Things

One note Nick told me kept rattling around in my head ever since: "For a card game like this, I feel like it should only have one weird new thing, not two". I believe he was specifically referencing how this game seemed to not be sure if it is a shedder or a stock-aquisition-based game. But I kept thinking about this and realized that it is already doing 2 weird things, and I think that's been my problem. 

In my first post about Odd Ducks I mentioned that there are 2 gimmicks, and only now am I realizing that trying to marry them together into one game has actually been the real problem.  Gimmick 1 involves the odds-high / evens-low idea, and this absolutely works best in a shed-out focused design. Gimmick 2 involves cards that are stocks tied to players, and this absolutely works best when playing cards is about grabbing NOT about getting the lead and going out.  Several times I've thought about changing gimmick 1 so that you could beat a meld with a larger one (like a triple beating a pair) so that there is extra flexibility to grab stocks, but that just doesn't work at all with the core conceit of the gimmick. I think these gimmicks need to break up.

Gimmick 1 as a game - Odds & Evens Ducks

I think there is an exciting betting/shedding game here, where gimmick 1 is allowed to shine. Here are my thoughts for a test of this as it's own game:

• Deck size is 2 x (1-7) per player so that everyone always has 14 cards and the full deck is always dealt. This means there will be far more duplicates which will allow the "set melds" more space exist in this design
• Keep the initial round bidding that was tested the previous time. Have cards like -1,0,1,2,3,4,5 (super TBD) and players in score order (or maybe reverse score order) choose one card after seeing their hands. 
• The player who selects the lowest will lead first.
• The player who selected the highest bid will double their shed-out bonus if they shed-out first. If they don't, then instead they lose that number of points and give them to the player who did shed-out first.
• I feel like this might need some form of a BOMB so that you aren't guaranteed to win with a single 7 etc. 

Gimmick 2 as a game - Stocky Ducks

This game should be all about having cards you take be stocks and manipulators. I'm not even sure if this should be a climbing game, but one thing I do know is that the card-play aspect needs to be much more flexible (perhaps more like Hachi train) with its card play. I will potentially keep the stock price fluctuation cards and stock cards in the deck idea, I'll need to think about this game much more before I have a coherent idea of how the card play should actually work. 

One strong note I got in both this and the previous test, was that players are interested in changing the values of other players' stocks in addition to their own. I feel like there is something there, but it's not even a shadow of a mechanical idea just yet.