Love to see a very thematic card game with standard playing cards especially a single-player one! I did two rounds, scoring 35 and 24. Turns out starting with 3 aces can be prettyyy good. Awesome entry, love it.

That is refreshing : a card game with paper instructions. It could maybe help if you got a youtube displaying the rule while playing. Maybe I get back to this when I'm a bit more rested.

Played this a few times. Notes:
- My first game, my hand was all low cards and so I lost very quickly when I hit a card that was a suit I just didn't have.
- The King of Diamonds seemed very powerful to have, because I could use that to clear any Hearts and just keep it in my hand and keep drawing new cards.
- I don't understand why cards in your hand don't get added to your final score when you get through the deck. I think it would make more sense to have them count extra, because they're unused resources. E.g. a game where you finish with 8 cards in hand should be scored higher than a game where you finish with 3 cards in hand.

Great solitaire! I like how the mechanics interact, and you can make nice combos.

@listonos Aces are the bombs of this game, powerful and destructive. They're really handy against hearts as you get to keep the ace.

@mdotedot That's a good idea but I don't have a setup that allows me to record myself.

@lsk The rules were set up in such a way that it should minimize the amount of times that the player is screwed out of the gate, but without more control over the randomness there was no way to ensure that you'd always start with a good hand.

As for your second and third points. Yes, the king of diamonds is powerful like that. Except that a secondary goal of the game is trying to clear your hand of cards. Generally when you do well, you do really well and are able to effortlessly get more cards. So the game then becomes not about digging down as fast as you can, but about trying to slow down and minimize the size of your hand by the end. Once you hit that point the roles of the cards change. The king of diamonds that was powerful before becomes a liability now, as you don't want to draw more cards.

Saying all that, there's still nothing from stopping someone from coming up with variant rules.

@gimbalock The first few iterations of this game actually didn't have the combos. Instead you'd chose which effect would happen from the pair, but that was boring and felt too mechanical. There was a definite ranking about which abilities were better so there was less decision making to be made. After adding the combos I couldn't go back to playing without them.

I am deeply surprised by the idea of the game. Unexpected choice of the game platform - IRL. You gave me the inspiration to make a pnp board game for the next Ludum.

Ah, oops, I played a game without getting to the second page with an example. It wasn't clear to me that *both* card abilities activate. I guess I misread "If two abillities would activate at the same time you can choose…". The description for the hearts ability was also confusing. "the other card in the pair" sounded to me like the newer card, rather than the not-hearts card, though that makes more sense. I got to 21, which didn't seem like a great score, but maybe it's not so bad with a handicap. I'm not usually one for Solitaire, so I'm at least glad I didn't get frustrated.

@niklas-zhaga Glad I could serve as inspiration. One thing to keep in mind with these sort of games is how much time people will want to devote to playing the game. It's why I chose playing cards, and a solo game. If you don't have to spend time printing things out and getting people together more people will play it.

@impiaaa Sorry it wasn't more clear. Writing code to run on human brains is difficult. In the paragraph above the list of abilities for the suits it has the rule "put both cards of the pair into a discard pile on the side and activate the abilities for the suit of each of the cards." That could probably be made more clear by repeating "both" at the end of the line. So it would end up: "put both cards of the pair into a discard pile on the side and activate the abilities for the suit of both the cards."

I realy like the idea to make a card game. Greag job!
Scored 48 points the first time. I think there are some balance issues in the game, in particular with hearts and diamonds. But it's okay, i've got alot of fun playing :)
Maybe this game can be expanded into a multiplayer board game, like uno, with players making their turns one by one? Would be interesting to try.

@amolker I had briefly considered how to do a multiplayer variant of the rules. Have done something similar in the past with another solitaire card game I submitted to Ludum Dare. Unfortunately I wasn't able to come up with something that kept the general feel while also sticking to the one deck of playing cards restriction and having time to write everything up.

Neat game, played it a couple times and got a high score of 26. There was a fair bit of interesting strategy I got lucky that game by keeping some hearts for aces at all times and used those aces to extend my game a bit. the main issue i see is the balance between diamonds and hearts vs spades and clovers. It essentially means if you don't get lucky you have no way to do well.

Ludum dare analog game?? What devilry is this??
I like this one! :)

Card game sorcery! I think my score was 47 if I understood the rules.

It's nice to see a card game entered. It makes for a change in experience from some of the other games.

I don't know if I was lucky or not, but I was able to dig through the entire deck on my first play. Is there intended to be a way to play off the cards in your hand after the deck is finished, or do they just detract from a perfect score?

Cool game!

@jason-wilson Once you've gotten through the deck the cards left in your hand are stuck there and just take away from a perfect score. Part of the challenge comes in when you know you can get through the entire deck and trying to empty your hand, which can be more difficult than it seems.

my scores: 19,0,51. Cool game. I didn't like complex rules that define shallow game. they weren't written clearly. It is too random and too little strategy for me. I really like that you tried to make a game IRL.

An extremelly cool to play with a deck of cards like that. Whenever I though I found a winning strategy the deck corrected me (like people mentioning getting a big hand with heart cards). Feel like there could be e bit more of balancing still there, but really enjoyable nonetheless!

Super deep. I thought I was the greatest Grafa player of all time when I was able to clear the deck every time since my first try, then I looked at the amount of cards in my hand and thought "oh shoot, that's far from a perfect score". Played a few times and will definitely play it again. This is one of the best games I played in this jam so far, congratulations!

Hey! I've been playing this for a couple of runs and it was pretty fun, I got 48, 49, 49, 50, and 51 points. It's pretty easy to dig through the whole deck, but getting rid of the hand is the difficult part. The start of the game can also be quite interesting when you don't have a hand with red cards, making more cerebral every decision, however the middle part of the game is usually pretty bland without much interesting choices, and clovers kind of drag the game down at this point, despite being the most important cards for the endgame. Not really sure how to prevent that though.
I also played a 2-player variation, where the rules are practically the same except for:
-If a player can't make a match in their turn, they steal a card from their points pile to their hand, and pass their turn. This is for avoiding suicides to win a game.
-Final score is the number of cards in the points pile minus the number of cards in the hand when the game ends (meaning that the digging pile will be completely dug every match).
We had a lot of fun and will probably play more, even with more players(?)! Great job with a unique entry!

Very nice to find a card game in Ludum Dare!
I enjoyed it quite much! My scores were all over the place: 41, 48, 0, 25, 23, 50.
Well done! :)

Really enjoyable and i love that it's an analog game