Gamehelplunar

Overview

A twist on the traditional Trick Taking game, where one partner plays the Suit and the other plays the Rank, attempting to combine their cards into winning combinations

Deck Composition

The deck is composed of 48 cards:

3 of each rank card (without suits) in ranks 1-8

6 of each suit card (without ranks) in 4 suits (wolf, owl, lynx & bat)

Turn

To start off, each player picks 2 Rank cards and 2 Suit cards from their starting hand to exchange with their partner

Secondly, beginning with the start player, players flip one trump card facedown until only one remains faceup and this becomes the Trump suit

Then Tricks commence

The starting player can play any card they desire

The first player of a team can also play either a Suit card or Rank card, whilst the second player on the same team has to play the other i.e. if teammate 1 plays a Suit then teammate 2 must play a Rank

The first player to play a Suit determines the lead Suit of the trick, note that this does NOT have to be the start player nor the start team e.g. team A Player 1 plays Rank, team B Player 1 plays Suit, team B has determined Suit

Once Lead Suit is determined, the next player to play Suit must play the same Suit if they have it, or any if they do not hold a copy of Lead Suit

After a Trick is completed, determine the winner of the trick as follows:

If the teams played the same suit, the highest rank wins, if tied the team who played last wins

If the teams played different suits, and one was the trump suit, the team with the trump suit wins

If the team played different suits, with no trump played, the team who determined the Lead Suit (i.e. played Suit earliest) wins

The team who wins advances their team marker one space and retains any cards played by any team which contain the star icon

The leader of the winning team starts the next trick

Round End

The round ends when players run out of hand cards

Each team scores points based on the stars next to their position on the team track

In addition, each team scores a point for each retained star card

A new round begins

Game End

The game ends if, at round end, at least one team has scored at least 30 points

The team with the most points, wins!

If tied, continue playing rounds until there is a clear winner

2 Player Variant

There is a neutral Sky area with its own 'hand' of cards

In each round, each player has two turns, one where they must play Suit or Rank, and the other where they play what they did not play before

In addition, one card must come from their hidden hand and the other must come from the shared Sky 'hand', again the order is player choice but the second turn must be played from where they did not play before

In regards to following Suit, ONLY consider the cards in the area you plan to (or must) play from e.g. if there is a lead suit card in the Sky but none in your hand, you can choose to play a non-lead Suit from your hand.