Design Brief
A hand shedding competitive multiplayer card game themed after a terrible work meeting where everyone is trying to avoid having extra work put on their plate. Players must empty their hand by playing cards into a central play area following some basic rules.
Themes and Tone
The game has basic themes of trying to avoid work, the basic card to play provides limits on what the next player can play and there’s cards with more complex rules that allow one player to target another to try and pin them into drawing more cards.
Design Inspirations
Taking design notes from Uno and Phase 10 where keeping an eye on the main field and your own hand and following patterns on play to see if you can guess what isn’t in another player’s hand.
The basic design was inspired by a pin found online, unfortunately a cursory search can’t find the origin of the image:
Core Mechanics
Play starts by picking a starting player, either randomly or whoever lost the previous round.
All players draw 10 cards into their hand or are dealt them by the starting player.
The cards are one of 6 categories:
- Reply (single color card, no extra effect)
- CC (duel colored card, no extra effect)
- As Per My Last Email (all color, all other players draw a card)
- FW: (duel colored, pick another player, put a card from your hand into theirs)
- BCC: (single color, force another player to play out of order then you get a second turn)
- Reply All (all color, any other player may play a card on top of this, only first played counts, then play returns to normal)
Each card has some number of colors on them Blue, Cyan or Yellow, each card that’s played can’t share a color with the card before it (except for all colored cards, they can wild to any of their composite colors). If you can’t play a card due to these rules, draw a card to your hand and draw a second card and place it on top of the play stack, if the newly drawn card onto the play stack is also black, continue drawing cards to the top of the stack until you get a duel or single colored card.
Once a player has emptied their hand of cards they are out of the round and their turn is skipped and they can’t be the target of any card another player would use. The game continues until only a single player is left, they lose the round, all other players avoid losing; there is no winner.
Currently the desk of cards is shaped like so:
- Reply: 20
- CC: 9 (increases must be done in multiples of 3 due to color combos)
- As Per My Last Email: 4
- Reply All: 4
- FW: 9 (increases must be done in multiples of 3 due to color combos)
- total cards: 46
Scope Hope
The scope of this project is quite small, no plans for additional features outside of the above.
Visual Design
Visual design might be a bit muddled, as currently the design relies on using the CMYK color space of pure colors, or by using old dither printing techniques to subtractivly combine the Red, Yellow and Blue colors to make Black.
Current card design is using rotational CMYK dithering to make the colors pop, but without that effect the cards should looks like below:
