Rules

We're playing a turn-by-turn card game playable with 2–6 players, appropriate for all ages.

Set up

The game is played with cards of six colors. Each color has nine cards with the values 1 to 9.

Two players

If playing with only two players, play with only four of the colors.

The cards in play are evenly distributed between the players. Each player can see their own cards.

Each player will play a turn in order. The first player to hold no cards in their hand wins.

Playing a turn

In addition to the player's hands, some cards are placed on the table (none at the start of the game). When a player plays, they place new cards on the table, which replace the existing cards (if any). The cards that were previously on the table are discarded, except that the player must take one of them in their hand.

Thus, each turn is composed of two parts:

1. Place cards on the table.
2. Take one card from the previous cards.

Placing

A player can place one or more cards at once. However, a player can only place at most one more card than what is currently on the table. Therefore, if the table is empty, the player can place at most one card. If the table has four cards, the player can place at most five cards.

If placing multiple cards at once, they must all either be the same value, or the same color.

The played cards must have greater value than the table. The value of a card combination is the concatenation of the values of the individual cards, in descending order. For example, the cards 5, 3 and 7 have value 753.

Special case

If a player is the first to play (i.e. there are no cards already on the table) and all their cards are of the same color or of the same value, they can play their entire hand at once and immediately win the game.

Taking

Once a player has placed cards, we must remove the cards that were previously on the table. The player must take one of them (of their choosing) into their own hand. All other cards are discarded (they are out of the game).

Because of this, players cannot have a long-term strategy: each turn, they will get a new card from the previous player.

Once the player has taken their card, the next player's turn starts.

Passing

If a player cannot play at the start of their turn, or they don't want to play (because they don't want to take any of the cards currently on the table), they can pass.

Passing has no future impact: if the other players continue to play, and it's the passing player's turn again, they can play a normal turn (or pass a second time).

However, if all players pass in a row, it is considered that the table is too high for anyone to play. Therefore:

• The table is reset: all cards on the table are discarded.
• The next player is the player who placed the cards that made everyone pass.

Winning

The first player to hold no cards after the 'Placing' step wins the game.