Game Bits

Requires:

  • At least 2 decks of regular playing cards

  • A 10-sided die

  • A 6-sided die

4 types of tokens:

  • Special attack

  • Horde attack

  • Health pack

  • Weapon upgrade

Preparation

Take a deck (multiple decks?) of cards, deal them out evenly to up to 4 players. Your hand is your health: when you run out you are dead. Leave one deck undistributed to players and place it in the middle of the board. This is the special infected deck, it represents the strength of the attacks of the special infected.

To prepare the board, take the tokens and scatter them all, face-down, randomly along the board.

Rules

To play, place your piece on the start point. Roll 1d6, this is the number of spaces you may move. You can choose the direction of movement each turn before you roll, and you may not switch directions on each space. In other words: if you roll 3, you may move only 3 spaces forward or 3 spaces backward, but not, say, 2 forward and 1 back.

As you move across the board from the start point to the safe house, you or your teammates will come across a space occupied with a token. When you do, stop on that space and turn over the token:

  • Special attack, turn over the top card of the special infected deck. If you have a card which is equal or higher than that card, you win the battle. Otherwise, take one of your cards and place it in the discard pile. You cannot move on your next turn and must discard one card per turn until a teammate moves across your space and rescues you.

  • Horde attack, roll 1d10: this number is the strength of the horde. Each player must play a card which beats this number. If they do not have a card beating that number, they must discard one card from their hand. On subsequent turns they must discard another card, until a teammate moves across their space and rescues them.

  • Health pack, this token allows you to shuffle the discarded health pile, draw N cards from it sight unseen, and place them back into your hand. N is the number written on the token. Instead of applying the pack to yourself, you may apply it to another player. You can also hold onto it and use it later, however you cannot use it while your progress is suspended during an attack.

  • Weapon upgrade, gives you a bonus of N when defending yourself in any future attacks. N is the number written on the token. Thus, if the card to beat is a 10 and N is 4, you only need to play a 6 or higher. You can only have one of these token in effect at a time; they cannot be combined.

Goal

The goal of the game is to move to the end as a team. The game is over when all players are either dead or have reached the end of the board.

The team has a score which is calculated at the end of the game. The score is computed using the following formula:

  • Count the least number of spaces crossed by all players. Thus if 3 players reached the end and the 4th only reached the 12th space, then this is 12. Divide it by the number of spaces total, to get a percentage, which is your progress score.

  • Count the number of cards still held by all players. This is the total health.

  • Count the number of players which made it to the end of the board.

Multiply the progress score by the total health and number of surviving players. This is the team score. The challenge of the game is to get the highest team score possible.