Presenting: Clubs!

So yesterday at lunch I was thinking about this semi-collectible card game I'm designing, and specifically this trump mechanic I'd come up. It didn't seem quite right for that game, but I wanted to do something with it. I've been toying with notion of creating a game for a standard playing card deck for a while now, since I thought it would be fun to make a game that I can teach to anybody really quickly, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. So now, without further ado, I present...

CLUBS!

Clubs is a game for roughly 4 players. It requires only a standard 52-card deck of playing cards.

SETUP

Shuffle the deck and deal the entire deck out. For a normal four-person game each player has a hand of thirteen cards. For other sizes, remove any excess cards from the game so that all players have an equal number of cards. At the start of the game, clubs are trump.

PLAY

The player to the left of the dealer leads the first trick. Moving counter-clockwise, each player plays one card from his/her hand. The highest trump card wins the trick; if there are no trump cards then the highest card played, regardless of suit, wins. In the event of a tie, nobody wins the trick. The player who won the most recent trick then leads and play continues.

If in any trick one suit outnumbers the other suits, that suit becomes the new trump, starting with the next trick.

WINNING THE GAME

At the end of the game, each player takes the tricks he/she won and counts the number of trump cards (based on whatever the final trump suit was) and non-trump cards. Players receive 2 points for each trump card taken and 1 point for every other card. Whoever has the most points when everyone feels like stopping wins the game!

SOME NOTES

There are some things about this game I'm unsure of (so any playtesting comments are appreciated). Specifically, here's what I'm concerned about:

-What to do with tied tricks. Right now I'm just throwing 'em out, but I feel like there ought to be a more elegant solution. Maybe adding them to the next trick?

-When exactly does the new trump kick on. My original version had the trump kicking in immediately and affecting the current trick. I changed it to affect the next trick because I liked the idea of having to sacrifice one card which could be a winner to make other cards winners. It's a nice trade-off. Otherwise, it seems a bit too powerful a move, shifting the game in your favor and winning a free trick.

-The scoring system. Originally I thought to just make it a point per card, but I like the idea of trying to win trump cards, and I thought it'd be cool to play off the mechanic in Hearts, so I switched it to a point per trump card and nothing for non-trump. That seemed a little unfair, though, and the sort of system that could easily screw over someone who'd played the whole hand well. I think the current version is a good compromise.

So yeah, please play it. And if you do, let me know if it's fun. If it isn't, I'll fix it, cause it'd be cool if this were a game that people actually played. Now all I need to do is make up a drinking version...