† ๑ ∪ λ θ ╲

A BANDIT'S SEIZE

The Deck

Craft a deck of 42 cards: six suits, each holding the seven cards with the corresponding numeric values — Youth 2 · Beauty 7 · Strife 8 · Love 9 · Wisdom 11 · Kingdom 12 · Death 14.

The six suits:
╲ The Demon · † The Celestial · ∪ The Giver
๑ The Unbound · λ The Wild · θ The Arcane

The Wheel

In the wheel, consonance, dissonance, and complacency exist.

Dissonant pairs:
The Celestial ↔ The Demon · The Giver ↔ The Wild · The Arcane ↔ The Unbound

Consonant kin:
[ The Celestial · The Giver · The Arcane ]
[ The Demon · The Unbound · The Wild ]

Complacency: all other relations.

The Seize

When the card you play would lose the trick, you may seize it: turn your card 90 degrees. Its suit becomes the Trump immediately, and you lead the next round.

Seizing to a dissonant pair drains the color from the opponent's card while maintaining the color of your own.

Seizing to consonance maintains the color of both cards.

Seizing in any other way drains the color from your card.

Colorless

A drained card is marked and considered colorless. Colorless cards cannot Seize, cannot be Seized to, and cannot win a trick.

If at any time an opponent Seizes and you hold a colorless card, you may discard that card into the trick and negate the Seize. No additional cards are drained.

If a colorless card is played to negate a Seize, you may respond by draining a Youth from your hand to force the Seize to be recognized.

The Poles & The Wise

Death cannot Seize.

Discard a Death from your hand to take a colorless card from the table and retire it from the game.

Retire a Youth from the game to restore color to a drained card — the drained card takes the color of the retired Youth.

Love and Kingdom, played and retired together, are the only way to restore color to a Youth. Shuffle it back into your deck.

Drain and mark a Wisdom to view the next two cards from any deck. It remains in your hand.

Play

  1. Before play, decide the stakes: ante cards from each deck, or choose some other metric.
  2. Flip a coin and call, or decide who plays first.
  3. Shuffle your deck and draw five cards to your hand.
  4. The first card played sets the Trump Tonic.
  5. Play one card from your hand into the trick, in turn. The highest card wins the trick; Trump cards beat all other suits regardless of numeric value. Ties go to the first card played.
  6. The winner of the trick takes it into their well and leads the next round.
  7. When you have no more cards in your hand, draw five more from your deck.

Winning & The Buyback

Winning is achieved when a Seize turns back to the Tonic Trump.

If the game has no winner and you run out of cards, you may shuffle the well of your taken tricks and draw from it. If you do so, you lead the next round. When you draw cards in this way, retire one card from your hand; on the second buyback retire two, and so on — until you can no longer hold a hand, or your well runs dry. A player who runs out of cards loses the game.

When you retire a card in any fashion, toss it into the flames.

At any time, either player may concede defeat and cut their losses.

The Marks

To mark a card as drained, take an edge and deface it. To mark a card as restored, score a ring around the defacement.

† ๑ ∪ λ θ ╲