Venture - A Card Game by James Ernest and Daniel Solis


If you follow the gaming kickstarter scene, you'll remember the massive smash hit James Ernest's Pairs. As a part of fulfilling that campaign, James Ernest is releasing several versions of the Pairs deck, each with new art and a unique variant standalone game that can be played with that deck.

I was lucky enough to playtest the variant rules for the Professor Elemental deck seen above. Over the course of a few weekly rigorous playtests, with a rotating band of eager and generous testers, the rules changed quite a bit based on collaborative, iterative, speedy revision.  Eventually the result was the current version of Venture, which was posted on the Cheapass site in late April.

It's a fast-paced, raucous game with a bit of bluffing and a lot of player-driven chaos.

  • Deal out the entire deck to all players so they have equal hands, then place any remainders in the center of the table as a "buffet."
  • Choose a card from your hand then everyone reveals their chosen cards at the same time. This begins the "firing" phase, but because my group played with the traditional fruit-themed Pairs deck, we called it the "eating" phase. We also referred to playing a card as "serving" a card.
  • The player who served the lowest number, eats the highest numbered card(s) on the table, gathering them into her personal score pile off the table. Continuing in ascending order, each player then eats any card(s) lower than the card they played, again gathering them into a score pile.
  • Continue playing turns until everyone's hand is empty. Each card in your score pile is negative one point. However, if you have all the cards of that number, then they're worth positive points. The player with the most points wins.
  • We also played with a variant where you draft your initial hand at the beginning of the game to control your starting position a bit.
  • We also did a lot of negotiating and alliances to make sure we wouldn't have to eat on a turn where we didn't want to eat. These phases were brief, but spiced up gameplay quite a bit.

That's just an overview. The more complete and up-to-date rules are on the Cheapass Games page. I'm proud to say James was kind enough to list me as a co-designer, but it was really a group effort from all the playtesters. Go grab your Pairs deck, 3-8 players, and give Venture a spin. I really think you'll dig it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5 Graphic Design and Typography Tips for your Card Game

Image
Chris Farrell of Illuminating Games just wrote a thorough critique of card games setting their body text to be so small that they cannot be read at arm's length, let alone across the table. Here's an excerpt, but the whole thing is worth a read for any would-be card game designers out there. (Myself included.) Break out your copy of the base set of Dominion, and look at the Chapel. This has a text box roughly 3.5cm by 4.5cm. It's got a single line of text. That line of text is 1 (one) millimeter high. 1mm! For me, it's only clearly readable at half an arm's length even in the bright light of day. (...) Compare this to a more sane game like Glory to Rome, where the font size is 2-3 times as large (text is 2mm high, keywords 3mm and usually highlighted). I can generally read Glory to Rome cards across the table, and can certainly see the important keywords. To heap insult upon injury, not only does Glory to Rome have far more legible text than Dominion it also has
Read more

One Thing to Avoid in Game Design

Image
When game designer Paul Peterson was interviewed for the upcoming Titans Series of games from Calliope Games, there was one segment at 1:55 that really caught my attention (emphasis mine): "A couple years ago I was teaching people how to play Guillotine and I hadn't played in a while. The first thing I did was say, 'The first thing you gonna do when you open your game is you look through this deck and you take this card.' I pulled out the Callous Guards card and threw it over my shoulder. Everybody laughed. I said, ' That's the biggest mistake I ever made as a game designer in my life.'" Oof. Those are strong words. What's the big deal? For context, the game Guillotine is all about collecting the heads of French nobles during the revolution. There is only one guillotine, with a line of nobles waiting for their grim fate. On your turn, you play action cards to change the order of the line, then take the Noble card from the front of the
Read more

Belle of the Ball Guest Name Generator

Image
Here's a fun little toy to tide you over while Belle of the Ball's is still in playtesting. Come up with your own name for a Belle of the Ball guest! Start with a first name from the first table. Then add a surname by combining a prefix and suffix from the second table. Bang! Now you're one classy Dental Untercaw or Chive Pimplesack!
Read more