Forget Venice
Designed by Andrew Watson
Players 3
Length 45 minutes
Extra Material Cheat Sheet and Player Sheet

Forget Venice (FV) is a set collection game. It uses a "divide the pie into three slices" mechanism to distribute cards to the players. Scoring, which takes place at the end of each half of the game, involves assessing your collection against three criteria. Most cards will score on more than one criterion.

Setup

Use the Extended Decktet, but remove the following three cards: Excuse; Island; Borderland. Shuffle the resulting 42-card FV deck and place it face down between the players.

The senior player should be player 1, and so Distributor for the first round of the first half. Senior here means most familiar with FV. (If all are equally (un)familiar with RV, it means most familiar with the Decktet. If all are equally (un)familiar with the Decktet, it simply means the oldest player.) The player to the left of player 1 is player 2, and the player to the left of player 2 is player 3.

Give each player a Player Sheet. The Player Sheet describes scoring. It is also a score sheet, and so useful to each player, however experienced. Write your player number (1, 2, or 3) in the space provided in the heading of the Player Sheet. Then focus your scoring criteria for the first half. For example, if you are player 2, criterion II means that you are aiming to have many more Moons than Wyrms, or vice versa.

Game Play

Give each player unfamiliar with FV a Cheat Sheet. The Cheat Sheet describes game play. It is only a single page, but is summarized here. There are two halves, each of six rounds.

Each round starts with the Distributor (D) taking the top 7 cards from the deck, then dividing them into 3 piles, each pile consisting of one or more cards. The player to the left is First Chooser, and so chooses one of the piles. The next player, again going leftward/clockwise, is Second Chooser, and so chooses one of the remaining two piles. D has no choice but to take the only remaining pile.

At the end of each round, the D role moves to the left, so that Player 2 is D for the second round, Player 3 for the third, Player 1 again for the fourth, and so on.

The end of the sixth round marks the end of the first half, as well as the end of the FV deck. Score the first half now, using the Player Sheets. There is an example of scoring on the back of the Cheat Sheet.

Collect and shuffle the cards for the second half. The second half is very similar to the first. The player with the highest first-half score is D for the first round of the second half. (Yes, first-half scores are public.) The D role moves to the left in each subsequent round of the second half.

After the second half comes final scoring: the addition of first and second half scores, and the comparison of the result among the three players. Highest sum wins: first tiebreaker is score in second half; second tiebreaker is score in second half on criterion III.

The Extended Deck

As noted above, the FV deck is the Extended Decktet, without three specific cards: Excuse; Island; Borderland. This means that the FV comprises 42 cards:

  • All 24 two-suited cards
  • All 12 one-suited cards (Ace and Crown of each suit)
  • 6 of the 8 three-suited cards, omitting the two that do not span a FV suit pair
  • 0 suitless cards, since Excuse is the only suitless card, and it is omitted

Variants

I have given the current version the number 0.99, since I believe it to be close to version 1 of a playable game. This may be optimistic, since the previous version (0.90) received only one playtest.

Beyond V1, there are several possibilities for variants, extensions, and the like.

  • New scoring criteria.
  • Secret scoring criteria. This was a feature of V0.90, but turned out to be a bug in that context. An improved implementation of secret scoring may reappear in a future variant/extension.
  • Variants for different numbers of players. FV is a 3-player game. But it might be possible to devise variants for 4 or (more likely) 2 players.

Credits

Thanks to:

  • Playtesters
  • PDM, for the Decktet
  • You, for reading this

Links

There is a Forget Venice page at my own site.

Comments

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