Grid Cannon
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asheraryamGrid Cannon
Uploaded by
asheraryamGridcannon
#solo-card-game
See the source blog article.
Setup
1. Start with a shuffled deck, including jokers.
2. With the deck face-down, draw cards from the top and lay them out
face-up in a 3×3 grid. If you draw any royals, aces or jokers during
this, put them on a separate pile and keep drawing til you’ve made the
grid of just number cards.
3. If you did draw some royals, you now place them the same way we
will when playing: put it outside the grid, adjacent to the grid card it’s
most similar to. ‘Most similar’ means:
1. Highest value card of the same suit
2. If none, highest value card of the same colour
3. If none, highest value card
4. If there’s a tie, or most similar card is on a corner, you can
choose between the equally valid positions
4. Any aces and jokers you drew during set up, keep them face-up to
one side. These are Ploys you can play whenever you like, rules
below.
5. Once you have a 3×3 grid of number cards, you may choose one to
replace if you like: put it on the bottom of the draw pile and draw a
new card to replace it.
The Goal
Find and kill all the royals.
Play
Draw the top card from the deck.
If it’s a royal: use placement rule above.
If it has value 2-10: you must place it on the grid. It can go on any
card with the same or lower value, regardless of suit.
If it’s an ace or joker: keep it to one side, see Ploys.
Killing royals: if you’re able to place a card on the grid opposite a royal –
so there are two cards between – those two cards Attack the royal. The
sum of their values must be at least as much as health of the royal to kill
them: if it’s not, you can still place the card, but the royal is unaffected.
The value of the card you just placed is not part of the Attack, only the two
between.
Jacks: 11 health. The cards Attacking can be any suit.
Queens: 12 health. The cards Attacking must match the colour of the
queen to count.
Kings: 13 health. The cards Attacking must match the suit of the king
to count.
If you killed the royal, turn it face down but don’t remove it – new royals
you draw still can’t be placed in that spot. Once every spot around the grid
has a dead royal in it (12 total) you’ve won.
Ploys:
Aces are Extractions: at any time you can use up one of the aces
you’ve drawn to pick up one stack of cards from the grid and put them
face-down at the bottom of your draw pile. You can do this even after
drawing a card and before placing it. Turn the ace face-down to
remember you’ve used it.
Jokers are Reassignments: at any time you can use up one you’ve
drawn to move the top card of one stack on the grid to another
position. The place you move it to must be a valid spot to play the
card, and placing it can trigger an Attack the same way a normal play
can. Turn the joker face-down to remember you’ve used it.
If you cannot place a card: and you have no Ploys to use, you must add
the card as Armour to the royal it’s most similar to (lowest value royal of
same suit, failing that lowest of same colour, etc). It increases their health
by the value of the card. So a King with a 3 as armour now has 13 + 3 =
16 health. You can add armour to a royal that already has armour – it
stacks. If a royal ends up with 20+ health (or 19+ for a King), that’s a
natural loss as there’s no longer any way to kill them. (Credit to Chris
Thursten for the armour idea!)
If there are no living royals on the table: if every spot around the grid
has a dead royal on it – all 12 – you’ve won! If not, just keep drawing
cards until you find a royal, placing the cards in a face-up pile as you go.
Once you find a royal, place it, then add the cards you cycled through to
the bottom of your deck.
If the draw pile runs out: and you haven’t killed all the royals, use any
ploys you have left to fix the situation if you can. If you’re out of both cards
and ploys and not all royals are dead, you’ve lost.
Scoring
If you’ve killed all the royals without running out of cards, your score is
how many Ploys you have left unspent. So the maximum score is 6.