King’s Court

In the past 2 lessons, we created our own game with tools such as playing cards and dominoes, and the game I came up with is called King’s Court.

As I’ve stated in class, I’m a big fan of strategy games, especially ones involving cards. Big 2 is one of the more popular card games and is one of my personal favourites, so I figured basing King’s Court off that would be a good idea, since some rules would be similar to those of Big 2 and thus easier to learn and remember.

The rules are a little complicated, and listing them all down would take a while, but the general rundown is that everyone has 13 cards, and you can only look at 3 at once (the rest is kept face down in a “replenish deck”). The objective is to get rid of all your cards, so you’ll have to strategize to figure out your best play, your opponents cards and become the “King” of each round in the game. Here is a complete keynote of the instructions.

Some challenges I faced were straightening out the rules so that players could have a decent chance at winning even if they had numerically low cards. My first version of the game stated that all plays must be beaten by the same play, so singles can only be beaten by singles, pairs by pairs, and sets by sets. However, this raised the problem of people having strong sets containing numerically low cards and being unable to play against strong singles or pairs.

My final version has altered the rules to fix this, but I have yet to receive feedback to further improve it (which is entirely my fault for not preparing the instruction keynote/video on time). I will use the feedback I receive next class to make further changes as necessary.

For the next game I create, I’d like to try using a different medium (maybe with dominos or even mahjong pieces), and I’ll try making a simpler game with less complex rules so others have a greater incentive to learn how to play it.