The King’s Cards – by Tim Doyle
The Rules:
- 2-4 Players allowed
- Play a game of Uno, only the objective is to collect as many cards of the same color by the end of the deck
- By the end of the game, whichever colored card you have the most of is your designated color, and you gain 1 point per card you have
- All special cards maintain their properties (skip cards, reverse, wild cards, etc)
- If by the end of the game two or more players have been collecting the same color, they all lose
- If by the end of the game you have cards not belonging to your color, you must subtract points from your score
I originally centered the game around the rules of King’s Cup, where whichever card is drawn dictates some action the players have to complete, but those rules didn’t transfer over very well to the context of this class. I was suggested to try and use Uno cards to make the game more intuitive, by using the numbers and colors to dictate certain actions and make it easier to remember what it is the player should do, but that was still too complicated. After my first play test outside of class, I found that it was still difficult and confusing to use rules dictated by King’s Cup using cards that weren’t from a standard deck. Eventually, I decided to scrap the rules of King’s Cup entirely and chose to appropriate the rules of Uno instead. I wanted my rules to emphasize division and segregation, so I used the different colors as the centerpiece surrounding my appropriation. The original game of Uno already plays with this idea of using a card’s color to dictate the player’s options, where you can only play one color card per turn unless you meet some specific scenario, but I decided to turn up the use of the colors in my appropriation. Instead, you are forced to collect as many of the same color as you can.
The play tests were simple and easy, as the game of Uno is not very difficult to comprehend. What I noticed is that it was difficult to gather a large amount of cards because of the nature of Uno, but that was alright in the end because you technically didn’t need a lot of cards to win the game.
The game isn’t made to be super balanced, but it was crafted to be a more artistic take on the use of the cards themselves. I drew a lot of inspiration from some of the works in Dada, and more specifically the simple creativity that the artists used in their works. My favorite art pieces from the book were very derivative of the original piece, where they heavily used the source material in their appropriated work, focusing more on putting a simple and creative twist on the work instead of completely warping it. This is what my game has in common, where the game fundamentally feels the same as a regular game of Uno, but the simple change in win conditions completely changes how the game is actually played by the players.