Foggy Day on Mulberry Street by LDJam user 205479
A card game about delivering letters on a foggy day.

Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 15 mins
Equipment: 1 deck of 52 standard playing cards, without Jokers. A table or playing surface with enough room to comfortably fit 13 cards all in a row.
Story: You are postal letter carriers working to deliver letters on Mulberry Street. It is a very very foggy day. Players will deliver letters to houses along the street by playing cards onto each house's mailbox. Unfortunately it is so foggy that you have no idea which house is which until the fog clears.
The rest of the rules are in the downloadable PDF. Enjoy!
You can play online via TTS, or Gosh Golly (linked below)
| Gosh Golly Games Online | https://goshgolly.neocities.org |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/foggy-day-on-mulberry-street |
Ratings
| Given | 18🗳️ | 22🗨️ |
Well, it's not clear to me that there is a dominant strategy, even with 2 players, so in that sense it's very clever for such a simple ruleset, where everything is open as well.
On the other, so much can change with even the last card (after all, the sequence only needs to be 1 off, which by necessity is determined by the last card even), that, as a human player just picking the game up for the first time, you can't really say much about the game in the early to mid state.
On the one hand (pun not intended, but appreciated nonetheless) this leaves the eventual endgame (where each player just has a few cards left) open to anyone not actively trying to loose, which is good.
But here is where it falls down for me a bit; since there is effectively _nothing_ I feel you can do to properly set yourself up in a direction, it just feels like the only thing you're doing for a lot of the game is only _setting up for_ the interesting make-or-brake situation at the end.
(Kind of like if setting up the chess board, or those chess-puzzles in the papers, was/where half the game.)
(I have the nagging feeling that I'm overlooking something though -- not in the rules, but in ways this can/should be played.)
On situation that I thought of, a tad more likely to come up with 2 players, is that they might run out of cards before the street if full of houses (say in a situation where houses get lots of letters).
I'd love to hear more if you manage to play with more players :)
I think you're missing an alternative ending condition from the rules: since stack sizes are not limited, there might never be 13 houses established. In that case I figure play goes on as long as players have cards.
Bonus points for introducing me to Heckadeck.