Evaluation
This card game was inspired by the game Tennessee for Two in the Rook rulebook. Both games are a two player trick-taking game with a draw pile. My intention was to turn Tennessee for Two into a game played with tarot cards while making use of the fortune telling theme. How my game ended up was different from the original Tennessee for Two in a few ways.
I tried to have mechanisms that fit the ethos surrounding tarot cards. When the cards are dealt, the players get to pick what pile becomes their hand; the winner of a trick gets to pick what card to draw; trump is always the fifth suit. These are all mechanisms that reinforce a feeling of fortune.
With every card having “full art”, and with each card having its own significance, I felt it would be against the theme to remove any card from the deck. The Rook rulebook is not afraid of removing cards from the game when the game has less players. Tennessee for Two is played with forty-five of the fifty-seven cards in a Rook deck, while my game is played with all seventy-eight of the seventy-eight cards in a tarot card deck.
The largest pitfall of my game is the sheer amount of cards you play with. Tennessee for Two is played in twenty tricks for one-hundred-sixty points each round; my game is played in thirty-nine tricks for one-hundred-twenty-two points each round. My game lasts almost twice as long, and there is innately less interest in each round. There are the same amount of medium to high point cards in the deck, with almost double the amount of filler.
Overall, just play Tennessee for Two. My game offers little gain for what you lose in wasted time each round.
Rules
Background
The game is played with tarot cards. In a tarot card deck, there are five suits: cups, pentacles, swords, wands, and trump. Cups, pentacles, swords, and wands are ordered aces, one through ten, pages, knights, queens, and kings, lowest to highest. Trump is ordered zero through twenty-one, lowest to highest.
The game is played like a standard two player trick-taking game. (The leader plays a card, the second player plays a card, the card with the higher face value wins and the person who played that card becomes the next trick’s leader.) Trump wins against any non-trump card and loses to higher valued trump.
Object
The goal of the game is to win as many points as possible. You win points by winning tricks with certain cards in them. There are a total of one-hundred-twenty-two points each round.
Setup
Shuffle and deal the deck into three piles. The non-dealer picks a pile to become their hand, the dealer likewise, and the third pile becomes a draw pile. Move the top card of the draw pile face up and to the side, this creates two options to draw from. (One option is the face-up card, the other is the face-down card on the top of the deck.)
Play
The non-dealer leads off for the first trick. After each trick and if there are still cards left to draw, the winner of the trick picks one of the two card options to draw to their hand. The loser of the trick draws the card option that wasn’t chosen by the other player. After both cards are drawn, flip over another card face-up, creating two options to draw from again. After the draw pile is depleted, the game continues until each player is out of cards.
Scoring
There are four kinds of cards that are worth points: aces, pages, kings, and trump. Aces are worth five points, pages and kings are worth ten points, trump cards are worth one point.
Add up all the points from the tricks you won at the end of every round and add it to your overall score. When a player gets an overall score of above three-hundred points at the end of a round, the player with the higher score wins.