THE CARD GAME
This is a points-scoring game. The first player to rack up 250 points is the winner. For those who desire a slightly-shorter game, the secondary finish-line number is 200. Below is the PDF containing the Napoleon’s Book of Fate cards re-designed for use as a card game, the card-back design, the envelope designed for holding the cards, the game rules, the Take & Leave sheet, and printable scoring-sheets. The point value only appears at the top of each card, so players will need to adjust their hand accordingly in order to calculate the value of their hand.
This download includes the deck, the card-back design, the game rules, the Take Leave & Tokens sheet, and the carrying box for the deck. If you print them out on cardstock, spraying them with a couple coats of acrylic sealer will make them easier to shuffle. Shuffling them on a bare table and not on a tablecloth will also make them easier to shuffle, as I discovered. I have also learned there is a company, at http://www.makeplayingcards.com, which will print out any deck design you desire on plastic cards, so if you want to play with these cards on an on-going basis, you might want to check that out. Plastic cards will be easier to shuffle as well. With this deck, I had to do the general smear ’em around face down on the table.
This game is ideal for four players, but as few as two or as many as five could play. The players each take turns being the dealer, shuffling and dealing the cards, starting with the player sitting in the east position and going in a clockwise direction around the table. Each player is dealt five cards, face-down, and the dealer lays the remaining un-dealt cards face-down in the ‘Take’ square. All players then take up their hands and calculate the value of their hand. After giving all players a moment with their hands, the dealer for the round asks, ‘does anyone wish to exchange?’ This is the time for any player who wishes to strengthen the value of their hand (most-likely those with a 0 or a 1-value card), to say yes. Each player who wishes to exchange a low-value card in the hope of obtaining a higher-value card draws one card from the ‘Take’ pile and leaves the card they wish to exchange it for in the ‘Leave’ square. Players may only exchange one card per round. And once the exchange is made, they cannot change their mind.
All players lay their cards on the table, and the player with the highest score takes a token from the bowl in the center of the table, as their reward for winning the round. If the chosen tokens for the game are candies, players are encouraged not to consume their candies until the end of the game. All players are responsible for keeping track of their point totals for each round, as the first player to make it to 250 (or 200, if you’re playing the shorter round) wins the game. At the end of each round, all the cards, including any cards in the Take or Leave pile are taken up and shuffled anew.
In my first experiment with this game, I was a bit surprised to discover that the player who won the most hands (got the most tokens) is not necessarily the winner of the game! Surely, the two would go hand in hand? I will address the significance of this in the next section, which addresses…