Nice Games Jam: "Grog"

Nice Games Club - a gamedev podcast!

This week, Lydia provides all the fun facts about living on a boat while your nice hosts develop a card game based around scurvy management!

• Hoyle's Official Book of Games

  -

  Wikipedia

Prompt

Create a pirate themed game about food and scurvy management.

Game type

Card game

Player count

2-4

Materials

Event deck

Resource Deck

Setup

Shuffle the event deck and the resource deck separately. Deal 5 cards from the resource deck to each player.

Rules

• Card game
  • Set making
  • Need to create as many sets as you can to create grog, while preventing vermin from being in your hand
  • These resources will keep you going in phase 2 when pulling from port of call / event cards
  • Whoever is able to travel farthest (successfully draw the most port of call / event cards) wins
• Beneficial food
  • Grog (face cards)
    • Rum - Jack
    • Sugar - Queen
    • Water - King
    • Limes - Ace
  • Salt meat/fish
    • Pork or Cod (Hearts)
    • Salt (Diamonds)
  • Hard tack (Clubs)
  • Suet (Spades) (added to meat or hard tack to enhance it)
• Vermin (clogs your hand and could cause problems in events)
  • Weevil
  • Maggots
  • Rats
• Rules
  • Each turn you have one action. You can either:
    • Draw a card
    • Play a complete set
  • After a certain number of cards (10 as default), you all go to sail and have ports of call events
    • Draw an event card each turn
• Ports of call / Events? - you get a point for every port you successfully make it to. Certain cards when “won” enter your stack and give you extra points or mechanical advantage
  • Windfall of resources
    • Everyone draws 5 cards and makes stacks
  • Ship cat
    • The cat joins the most rat-infested ship (removes all rats from hand)
    • OR spend the most salt meat to attract it to your ship
  • Trade with each other
    • Draw 3 cards and give 1 card from hand to the player on your left. Make stacks
  • Injured shipmate
    • Spend water and salt from your hand
    • Spend maggots from your hand
  • Threat of scurvy
    • Spend grog
  • Weevil infestation!
    • Lose a hard tack for every weevil in your hand. Discard those cards from your hand and stacks(?)