Over the years I've come up with many games, but the first (successful) card game I ever created was Kabloosh!
I was around 10 years old on an all inclusive holiday with my family in Greece, and after playing lots of card games during the evenings I wanted to come up with one myself...
KABLOOSH
Game type: Swap, Draw, Discard style. Lowest score wins
Difficulty: *
Players: 3-8, Best: 4-6
Aim of the game: To call Kabloosh with the lowest sum hand at the table.
The way I develop games is I start with a gimmick, then try and make the rules as simple and as intuitive as possible.
As a child I'd get annoyed that it was hard to keep track of how many cards someone had in their hand or where certain cards were (especially if people were swapping/ hiding them) so since this was MY game I made it that everyone had to have their 4 cards face down on the table.
The aim of most card games I'd played up to that point was to have the highest possible score, so I thought I was soooo clever making a game where having a low score was actually best (goes to show I hadn't played many)
The question then was how to score?
Well, cards numbered 2-10 already existed in a deck, so they could just be worth what they said on the tin! In most games an Ace is the best card, and Aces are often worth 11 or 1, so it made sense for Aces to be worth 1 and thus be the most desirable!
So far, so good. But what about the royals? Well, they are unique cards already, so what if they had special abilities! I decided they'd be worth 10, so you wouldn't want to keep them, but they'd also each have a special ability when discarded:
After some thought and test games, I came up with this:
Jack: draw 2 more cards.
Queen: peek at 2 opponent's cards.
King: do 2 swaps. Swap = 2 cards switching places. (A swap can be you and an opponent OR two opponents)
The queen and king worked well together, as if you saw your opponent had an Ace, you could steal it from them next turn with a king, and sabotage them with one of your high cards, while Jacks allowed for combo plays and longer turns.
GAMEPLAY
SET-UP: Every player is dealt a hand of 4 cards face down on the table.
The score of your hand is = the sum of all 4 cards (eg. A, 4, 9, K = score of 24)
You can look at your cards and swap their positions at any time, but they must always touch the table and must end in this layout:
TURN: Turn's rotate in a clockwise direction starting with left of the dealer.
On your turn you draw a card from either the deck, OR the discard pile.
If you drew from the deck you can either swap this card for one in your hand, or discard it.
Alternatively, If you drew from the discard pile you MUST swap this card for one in your hand.
If you swap, you must discard the card you are replacing.
If the discarded card is a royal, you may use it's special ability.
After your second turn, if you think you have the lowest hand at the table, before drawing a card you may shout KABLOOSH!
This ends the round and everyone turns their hand face up to work out who has the lowest sum. The player with the lowest hand earns 1 point.
However, if the player who called KABLOOSH is not the winner, they lose 1 point.
Play for as many rounds as you want, or to whatever score you want.
I was very proud of my little game as everyone who played it enjoyed it, from family to friends, to family friends, to people in my school during spare periods, to visitors at our house, to some people I met during my first semester of university.
Double Dutch
But then, in my 2nd semester, disaster struck!
While hanging out in the common room a friend from university casually suggested she could teach us a card game called "Dutch".
As I'm always keen to learn a new game, I said yes straight away.
She then started to recount the rules, and the more she spoke, the more my heart sank.
Because she was recounting the rules to Kabloosh...
They weren't exactly same, but the similarities were far too significant to ignore, like some inverse world version of the same game.
Like Kabloosh, Dutch was set up with 4 cards face down on the table, only they were positioned like this instead:
A double draw card didn't exist, as Jacks were the swap card instead of the king, though you were only allowed to do 1 swap instead of 2.
Queen remained the peek card, though you could only peek at 1 of your own cards, not your opponents.
Then the red kings were the best cards in the game as they were worth 0, while the black kings were worth 15.
And, you guessed it, instead of Kabloosh, you call out Dutch to end the game! (Though you are allowed to call Dutch at any point on your turn not just the start. Also, after a Dutch call every player gets one more turn before the round ends (though you are not allowed to swap cards with the player who has called Dutch, as their hand is now protected).
This all got me questioning myself. Had I ever heard of this game before and subconsciously plagiarised it? Maybe under a different name? But no, I definitely hadn't, following my thought process above it made sense that I could independently create something similar to an existing game and up to this point I actually preferred my rule set.
But then she explained the final 2 rules... rules that weren't in Kabloosh at all...
And after playing the game few times with these deviations, I came to a disappointing realisation.
Dutch was the better game...
The extra 2 rules:
Card blind: At the start of Dutch, you don't get to look at all 4 cards in your hand, you only get to look at 2. Then, as soon as you stop looking, you're not allowed to look again unless you play a Queen.
This rule forces you to concentrate on memorising your cards, and dis-incentives mixing your cards around.
It also adds an element of excitement and danger when swapping cards you don't know.
For example, you might pull a 4 from the deck, and then swap it for one of your hidden cards only to discover your hidden card was an Ace! (Also worth 1, btw), and you are forced to discard it for the next player to draw!
However, it can be good to swap out your hidden cards even for high numbers, because then you know for certain what that card is, and that is important for the next rule...
Snap:
At any point during the game (including not on your turn), if the card on top of the discard pile is the same as one in your hand, you can snap that card onto the discard pile, effectively removing a card from your hand.
This makes knowing and remembering your cards even more important, and allows people to come back from behind. You can even snap royals, and then use their ability!
As a consequence of these 2 rules, there are penalty cards. If a player breaks a rule, they receive the top card from the draw deck face down. This card cannot be interacted with (swapped, peeked at, snapped), and will be added to your hands total when someone calls Dutch.
Rule breaks that incur a penalty card:
If a player looks at one of their cards without using a queen, or accidentally turns a card face up.
If a player snaps incorrectly
If a player snaps too late (the card atop the discard pile changes before they snap)
If the player who calls Dutch does not win the round, instead of losing a point, they start the next round with a penalty card
Penalty cards actually make Dutch more fun, as it adds a serious consequence to a mistake, and there is nothing funnier than the winning player messing up and destroying their game with penalties.
So yeah, in short, Dutch is a great card game, and one I'd highly recommend, especially if you're with a crowd who usually aren't into card games.
However, there is one extra rule in Kabloosh that Dutch doesn't have, and it's great fun to incorporate into the game once people have learned how to play: add 1 or 2 jokers into the deck!
Jokers: worth 20 points. When discarded you must swap your entire hand with another player at the table!
Jokers add a factor of complete chaos: with a joker in your hand your goal suddenly becomes to make the worst hand possible, then pawn it off onto someone else.
A joker can flip a game on it's head, as with one move the winning and losing players can switch places.
The threat of a joker might cause a player to prematurely Dutch to protect their hand, or a player who called Dutch might discover their one hidden card is a joker and lose.
(NOTE: you can't do a joker swap with a player who has called Dutch, and penalty card's can't be swapped)
Card games often have a lot in common: look at how many different variants there are for trick taking games: Whist, Bridge, Hearts, Preference ect.
If anything, I now consider it a positive thing that I came up with a game that already exists on my own, as it shows their is some merit to the way I approach game invention.
In both writing and game creation, I don't subscribe to the suggestion that every idea has been done before, but I do believe the reason certain ideas or concepts are used again and again is because they are effective. It doesn't matter if you come up with something wholly original if it's garbage.
In this case, Dutch was too similar and also superior, so Kabloosh was decommissioned from my game set. But it will always have a special place in my heart as the first game I created that made other people smile.
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