I hope my title was enticing enough, I’ve got a little preamble here. Have you heard of The Shipwreck Arcana? box art

I played it at Pycon this year and immediately bought a copy. It’s got an interesting description: a compact, cooperative game of deduction, evaluation, and logic. It’s also got a neat makeup: some gorgeous tarot cards with basic number logic printed on them, a handful of colored 1-7 tiles, and a bag of black number tiles.

The tiles give that tactile Scrabble feel. Each player draws until they have two, and then they play one tile on one of the tarot cards in the center. The goal is to play on the card that provides the rest of the players with the most information for your remaining tile. If they can guess what your held tile is, they prevent the doom marker from advancing and everyone earns the ability on the back of the card.

I think it’s fun and works well cooperatively, but I’m also not the only one playing. My partner wanted something more competitive. So we made our own 2 player VS rules!

  1. One player is red, the other is green. 7 correct guesses to win
  2. Draw until you have two tiles. If this is not your first turn, you’ll have one held tile from the previous round
  3. You cannot play your held tile. It is only removed after your opponent makes a guess
  4. You try play your tile on the card that will provide the least amount of information. No lying!
  5. If your opponent can guess your held tile, they take the card and can use its ability against you
  6. If the card “fades” (like in base Shipwreck Arcana, it helps keep cards cycling through) it goes to the discard pile

It played pretty well in our handful of test games, so far they’ve have been roughly equal. I’ve nicknamed it “Drowned Arcana” because it feels like a more combative version of Shipwreck Arcana. I’m curious if anyone else has ideas or feedback, or if anyone else has their own homebrew versions of games.

  • donio@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Thanks, we will definitely give this a try!
    Do you keep all the cards in the game? Do they all work well in this competitive context? How about their powers?

    • Gamma@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I think the only card we didn’t use was the “free space” tarot. We made it so if you correctly guess a tile that was placed on “the hours” you could draw from the discard pile, too. The abilities mostly worked, their descriptions can usually be rephrased to work in a vs mode. Most of the time we’d use them when we’d be down to a 50/50 guess.
      The game probably would’ve been faster if we’d used them more liberally 😆