The Decktet Wiki

I've been playing Decktet games for quite a while (first with an Artscow printing, then a purchased deck…bought the book, too, twice!), and I checked back in at the Wiki to see what new games had been designed, and this was one of the ones I tried.

I like the mechanics of a climbing game using the names of the cards, and I especially liked your ingenious use of the aces to either capture a set, or turn it back to an earlier letter by continuing play, leaving all the cards at risk.

I also thought the use of the secret choices for your scoring suit and your opponent's danger suit was a nice fit, particularly combined with starting their scoring pile with a card unknown to them each round. This suggested the strategy of choosing your scoring suit at the beginning of the game, trying to play toward it, but at the midgame, choosing a different scoring suit if it wasn't working out. It encourages some forethought, although since the rules didn't say you could look over your captured cards between the Alpha and Omega hands, may be weighted a bit in favor of people skilled at counting cards (or at least with better memories). Also, after the rounds, if there were cards left in the losing player's hand that the winner didn't want to take, did these go in the losing players store, or were they discarded from the game? We played with the latter method.

The scoring possibilities during play didn't come up during our test games. It's possible we were so busy nailing down the general mechanics of play that we weren't looking carefully for those opportunities, but it also felt like it might overcomplicate what was otherwise a fairly elegant base game.

The endgame scoring seemed particularly slanted, at least in the games we played (admittedly, only a couple). Commenting on each in turn:

Sagaciousness - I liked having the small bonus point for the least cards that weren't covered by the scoring or danger suit. Given that you don't know one, it's a bit dependent on luck, unless you focused on only capturing one or two suits and the other player wasn't paying attention when choosing your danger suit. It just felt like a nice little bonus.

The Excuse - Being worth two points influences players to look out for this card and try to capture the trick it's in. An interesting inclusion.

Scoring Cards - I'm not sure I agree with points only going to the player with the most scoring cards, especially when they get one point for each card, while the other player gets nothing positive. I think this would tend to dovetail with the Danger scoring to cause a significant point difference much of the time. (I also assumed the cards which included both suits were counted in both sets rather than set aside as cancelling themselves out)

Danger Cards - Only counting negative points for the player with the most Danger cards, and also subtracting the highest number card in that suit, while no negative points happen to the other player? That can lead to a large point gap, as I'll show below with the scoring from our game. Also, the rules as written indicate that if your opponent chose the same danger suit as you chose to score with, that the suit would only score positive points, rather than being a cancelling effect. This significantly negates the other player's score, since they automatically have the most of their danger suit.

Pairs - I'm not sure how this was supposed to work. As written, you're only counting pairs within your scoring suit, which is only possible with pairs of Pawns or Courts. Aces and Crowns each only have one suit, and the number cards don't share a suit within the same rank. The most possible points here as written is 2.

Run - I like this idea — do the aces, pawns, courts, and crowns count in the ranking for this purpose? In my example game, I wasn't sure if I'd scored 4 or 7 in the run. Again, though, this score only applies to the player with the longest run?

Sociability - An interesting bonus, but this will be weighted by suit, as some have more personality cards than others: Moons (6), Suns (5), Leaves (3), Waves (4), Wyrms (4), Knots (7)

Vulnerability - Again, an interesting idea, but if you're only counting the danger suit, you run into the same weighting problem: Moons (2 - no risk), Suns (5), Leaves (7), Waves (7), Wyrms (5), Knots (3)

Scoring with the rules as written, an example game came out as such:

As I said, I wasn't sure whether to count the Pawns and Courts in the run, so I showed it both ways. It just seemed as though 26 (or 29) points was a wide spread. This was mostly due to all of the scores being all or nothing, positive or negative. Looking at a couple of other ways, here's how the score would go if, except for Sagaciousness, the Excuse, Sociability, and Vulnerability, all of the other scores applied to both players, regardless of who had the most:

One more way would be if the pairs, sociability, and vulnerability bonuses were counted against all the captured cards, rather than just the scoring suit. This would help eliminate the weighting issue. In that case, the score would have been:

Or, if you only count the difference in vulnerability and sociability, it would have been 5/8 to 3 — note that Player 2 had captured the most cards during the game and still lost by 26 points in the original calculation. For the pairs, Player 2 had captured several triplets in the number ranks, which we only counted as 1 pair, and a total of 4 aces, which we counted as 2 pairs — maybe another idea for a bonus could be for capturing all 3 of a number rank?.

Anyway, I hope you find this analysis constructive — I feel this game has a great deal of potential, but the scoring needs either streamlined, or a bit more balance. As I play more games, I'll try all three methods of scoring and see how it averages out over time. I still don't think I'll get as much use out of the in-game scoring, though.