I recently took a break from my day job—designing video games—to create Suitors, an original card game for 2 to 4 players. It uses regular playing cards. It’s simple enough that just about anyone can play, but deep enough that adults will find it competitive. A game lasts just a few minutes. Give it a spin and tell me what you think.
In Suitors, each player controls a Jack. The Jacks are all romantically interested in the Queen of Hearts—they are suitors in the antique sense, vying for her hand in marriage. They have a long way to go to reach her, however. The first Jack to reach the Queen wins her affections and the game!
Objective
Be the first to move your Jack next to the Queen of Hearts.
Setup
Use an ordinary playing card deck with the Jokers removed. Search through the deck and pull out the four Jacks and the Queen of Hearts. Shuffle the remaining cards.
To create the playing field, place the Queen of Hearts in the center of your play area. Then deal, face down, a grid of 9 by 5 cards surrounding the queen. Leave the corners for the Jacks, though, and place them face up, one per corner. Jacks of the same color should go in opposite corners.
You’ll have a few cards left over. Just set them aside—you won’t need them.
Each player chooses a Jack. If you’re playing with fewer than four players, leave the unused Jacks where they sit. When playing with two players, it’s best to choose Jacks that are diagonally opposite each other.
Decide which player goes first. And begin!
Playing the Game
On your turn, you may either (1) reveal a card or (2) move.
To reveal a card, simply turn up a face-down card that is connected to your Jack. A card is connected to your Jack if there is an unbroken line of face-up cards between it and your Jack. Diagonals don’t count. In the following image, if you were controlling the Jack of Spades you could turn over any of the cards shaded in blue. If you were controlling the Jack of Clubs you could reveal any of the cards shaded in red.
Once you reveal your chosen card, your turn is over.
The other action you can take on your turn is to move. In a nutshell, you move by making a higher-ranked card jump over one or more lower-ranked cards of the opposite color. Here are the specific rules for a move.
- A move consists of a “jump” performed by a jumping card (the “Jumper”).
- The Jumper must have a higher rank than any of the cards it jumps. “Rank” follows the normal rules of cards: King beats Queen, Queen beats Jack, Jack beats Ten, and so on down. But Aces are special (more on that in a moment).
- The Jumper must be face-up and connected to (by the same definition as above) your Jack. You can also use your Jack as the Jumper.
- The Jumper must be the opposite color from all of the cards it jumps (black jumping all red or red jumping all black).
- The Jumper cannot have participated in a jump since your last turn. In other words, if someone else moved it since your last turn, you can’t use it as a Jumper.
- The Queen of Hearts cannot participate in a jump. No one can ever move her.
- Other players’ Jacks cannot participate in one of your jumps. You can never move someone else’s Jack.
- A Jumper can leap over any number of cards in a single move, so long as the cards are all legal and they lay in a straight, connected line.
- You can’t jump diagonally.
To actually make the jump, simply pick up the Jumper, shift all the cards that are being jumped toward the space now vacated by the Jumper, and then place the Jumper in the space just vacated by the farthest card.
A picture is worth a thousand words. In this series of images, the player controlling the Jack of Spades uses it to jump over the Nine of Hearts and the Two of Diamonds. This is legal because a Jack is higher than Nine and Two. Also, the Jack is black and the cards it’s jumping are red. Jack could not jump over the Eight of Clubs, however, because it’s the same color as he is.
In that example, the player’s own Jack makes the jump. But any legal card can jump. In the following figure, the green arrows show other examples of legal jumps for both the Jack of Aces player and the Jack of Clubs player.
Strategy Tip: It’s smart to try to make your jumps as long as you can. It is often best to queue up a series of cards that can be jumped all at once.
There’s one more rule, and it centers around Aces. Aces are special. In Suitors, Aces are both high and low. Specifically, when it acts as a Jumper, an Ace is high—it can jump any other rank. But when it is jumped, an Ace is low—anything can jump it. So we should add a few additional arrows to the examples above.
Not only can the Six of Hearts jump the Ace of Spades, but the Aces of Spaces can jump the Six of Hearts. In this case the effect is the same either way, but in other cases it matters. For example, notice that the Ace of Clubs can jump the King of Diamonds. It can even, if it wants to, jump the King of Diamonds and the Ten of Hearts in a single move.
Because of this special ability, Aces are especially important in Suitors. If you can find an Ace, you can often use it to rapidly shift several cards at once.
Winning the Game
The game is over when one player moves his or her Jack to one of the four spaces that are adjacent to the Queen of Hearts.
In the above diagram, the Jack of Clubs has beaten the other Jacks by moving into the space to the right of the Queen. It is love at first sight.
This game design is © 2012 Jeff Wofford. Play it with real, ordinary playing cards all you want, but please don’t make a software version of it, or sell it in any form. You have permission to republish these rules so long as you credit me, Jeff Wofford, and identify me as the author of the work.
If you play Suitors, please tell me what you think.
7 Comments
FYI,
“Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it.”
Copyright Registration of Games
That being said, I’d hope people would be decent and honor your request.
Thanks for the link. Never was clear on that.
Jeff,
Great game!
When my friend and I were testing it out, however, we thought the gameplay would benefit from a greater reliance on player strategy, so I came up with this adaptation that takes some of the power away from the arrangement of the cards, and overall makes the game longer and more about opponent sabotage. It’s only been tested in the two-player scenario.
1. Setup: Almost as before, except only two opposite corners need to be occupied by face-up Jacks, and the Jacks must be of opposite color. The other two corners contain face-down cards, just like the rest of the playable area of the board.
2. Major Rule Change: On “your” (a given player) turn, the card you select to be the Jumper must be of the same color as your Jack.
3. Example: With the original rules, if it was your turn and your red Jack was cornered by two black Kings, you could just elect one of the black Kings as the Jumper and jump the Jack, thereby freeing him from the corner. With my adaptation, you could not perform this move because the Kings are of opposite color from your Jack, and so they are currently inactive as potential Jumpers…your only recourse is to find a red Ace to jump the Kings, after which you have a window to set up an escape.
So you see, with my adaptation there is potential for “walls” to be erected on the board, either by the random setup of cards, or intentionally by your opponent. Each player has the unique privilege to engage cards of his color as Jumpers (to potentially deprive his opponent of game-winning moves, which the opponent will be unable to simply un-do because of the color constraint).
Furthermore, it is almost impossible for a stalemate to occur, whereby a player’s Jack is unable to move because he is boxed in on all sides with no recourse for rescue. If you (or anyone) would like further explanation on the few instances where stalemate is possible, I’d be happy to explain. But rest assured that only a very unlucky shuffle (if my math is correct, probability of slightly less than 2%) will exclude both Aces of his own color from the playable area.
So there it is. A minor change to the board setup and one modification to the rules, and in my humble opinion the gameplay is opened up for far more strategy and sabotage. While I don’t think this would work so well for three players, due to lack of board symmetry, I’m confident that a variation would work very well for four players, especially if you wanted to incorporate teamwork in some way. All in all, I’ll be playing this game frequently, introducing it to my friends, and of course crediting you.
I’d love to know what you think of this, or if any point needs further clarification. But I thought the game was a fantastic idea, which is why I sought to play it as soon as I read the entry.
- Joe
Super! Thanks for the feedback. I’m glad you’re enjoying it!
Your variation is promising, and I’ll try it myself. I had tried a variation like that before settling on the version above. What I didn’t like about it was that it made the game feel “stuck” more often—the play flowed less smoothly. I felt that I was waiting too often for just the right card to turn up, and if my opponent got lucky and wasn’t similarly blocked, the contest soon felt hopeless. The advantage to your variant, though, is that it makes the game feel less like a mad dash—more careful and deliberate. But then again, I happen to kind of like the “mad dash” feeling.
I’ve been playing with another variation that also increases strategy and reduces the luck factor somewhat. This variant doesn’t involve any rule changes, but uses two decks. (1) Remove all jacks and both Queens of Heart from the decks. Set aside one set of Jacks and one Queen of Hearts, using the others for the actual game. (2) Setup the game using an 11-by-9 grid with, again, the Queen of Hearts in the center and Jacks on all corners (or all needed corners, depending on the number of players.) (3) Play as before.
This variant makes the game feel more strategic simply because there is more time and space for players to range out and make decisions about how to streamline their jumps. Luck dominates less because both players have more cards to move through, and therefore idiosyncrasies in the layout of those cards tend to even out.
Thanks again!
I like this game (as written), but I found that with 4 players it very quickly turns into a free-for-all, with almost all cards face up and everyone able to jump anything on the table. This means that you end up blocking each other quite a lot, and in the end one player is forced to choose which of two others gets the queen. (That’s life, I guess–not sure there’s any easy way to avoid it.)
No complaints about the 2-player though. It’s fun.
Odd. I haven’t experienced this. We played a couple of 4-player games last night and had no instances of blocking. In our games it’s usually possible for someone to win within 8 or so turns, when only half of the cards are face up and not everyone is yet connected. It may be, then, that your early game is going too slowly, with too much turning up of cards and not enough movement?
I suppose so, yes. Now that I think about it we got into the habit of turning over a lot in the hope of making bigger jumps, and everyone just followed suit. If I get the chance to play it again, I’ll try tje opposite strategy and see how that works.