Card Games: Climbing

The latest edition of the Seers Catalog has everything you need for stopping werewolves. Can you limit yourself to the essentials in time to save the village?

Seers Catalog is an almost-shedding card game in which each player tries to get rid of almost all of the cards in their hand. Each round, players have a unique set of artifacts that give them asymmetric abilities to help manage their hand of cards. When one player runs out of cards, the round is scored: Each card is worth -1, but if you have five or fewer cards in your hand, the lowest value on those cards is worth positive points! However, once you have five or fewer cards, you can no longer voluntarily pass, so holding on to a high-value card near the end of the round hoping for a big payout can result in total failure.

Haggis is a climbing game in the same family as Zheng Fen and Big Two. It borrows and recombines elements from its parent games - card combinations, bombs, scoring for cards in hand, scoring for cards collected in tricks - and it mixes in equally distributed wild cards and betting that you'll be the first to empty your hand of cards.

SCOUT is a ladder-climbing game in which cards have two potential values, players may not rearrange their hand of cards, and players may pass their turn to take a card from the current high set of cards into their hand.

More specifically, cards are dual-indexed, with different values on each half of the card, with the 45 cards having all possible combinations of the numbers 1-10. During set-up, whoever is shuffling the cards should randomize both the order of the cards in the deck and their orientation. Once each player has been dealt their entire hand of cards, they pick up that hand without rearranging any of the cards; if they wish, they can rotate their entire hand of cards in order to use the values on the other end of each card, but again they cannot rearrange the order of cards in their hand.

On a turn, a player takes one of two actions:

• Play: A player chooses one or more adjacent cards in their hand that have all the same value or that have values in consecutive order (whether ascending or descending), then they play this set of cards to the table. They can do this only if the table is empty (as on the first turn) or the set they're playing is ranked higher than the set currently on the table; a set is higher if it has more cards or has cards of the same value instead of consecutive cards or has a set of the same quantity and type but with higher values. In this latter case when a player overplays another set, the player captures the cards in this previous set and places them face down in front of themselves.

• Scout: A player takes a card from either end of the set currently on the table and places it anywhere they wish in their hand in either orientation. Whoever played this previous set receives a 1 VP token as a reward for playing a set that wasn't beaten.

Once per round, a player can scout, then immediately play.

When a player has emptied their hand of cards or all but one player have scouted instead of playing, the round ends. Players receive 1 VP for each face-down card, then subtract one point for each card in their hand (except if they were the player scouted repeatedly to end the game). Play as many rounds as the number of players, then whoever has the most points wins.