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How to play Diversity

This is a card game I invented. It's a fast-paced game of tactics and shifting power, for four players, played with a standard deck of cards. As card games are classified, it's a plain-trick evasion game, with the main innovations being an unusual rule for how tricks are taken, and no requirement to follow suit. I call it "Diversity" because the rules put special emphasis on sets of four cards containing one in each suit.

You will need four players and a standard 52-card deck of playing cards, also known as a "poker" deck, consisting of four suits of 13 cards each, ranking from Ace (highest rank) through King, Queen, Jack, 10, down to 2 (lowest rank), with no jokers.

Agree on who will be dealer first, and a minimum number of hands to play. That will determine the length of the game; I suggest four hands, so eveyone gets a chance to be dealer.

Dealer shuffles the deck, offers it to the player on the right to cut, then deals it all out to the players, giving them hands of 13 cards each.

Play proceeds much like other trick-taking games (Whist, Bridge, Hearts, and similar). The basic objective is to take as few tricks as possible.

The player to the left of the dealer leads to the first trick by playing one card from their hand, face up in the centre. Then the remaining players in clockwise order each play one card face up. Any card may be led, and any card may be played to follow; there is no requirement to lead a specific card or suit, to follow suit, to play above or below other cards, to avoid doing these things, or similar.

If the four cards in the trick are exactly one in each of the four suits, then the lowest-ranking card takes the trick. For example, if the cards are 6, 4, 8, J, then the 4 takes the trick. In case of a tie, the earliest-played card involved in the tie takes the trick. For example, if the cards in the order played are 9, 10, 6, 6, then the 6 takes the trick.

If the four cards in the trick are not exactly one of each of the four suits, then the highest-ranking card of any suit represented more than once, takes the trick. For example, if the cards are 3, 6, A, Q, then the Q takes the trick. A tie in this case is only possible when the trick consists of exactly two cards in each of two suits, and here again, the earlier-played card in the tie takes the trick. For example, if the cards are 2, 3, 9, 9, then the 9 takes the trick.

The player who takes the trick gathers the played cards and keeps them, face-down, for use in scoring at the end of the hand. The player to the left of whoever took the trick (not the trick-taker) leads to the next trick.

Once all 13 tricks have been played, the hand is over, and each player scores one point for each trick they took. The deal passes to the left for the next hand.

After the agreed minimum number of hands is complete, the winner is the player with the fewest points. In case of a tie for fewest points, play additional hands until there is a single winner.

Notes on the design

The inspiration for this game was asking, what would a trick-taking game be like without the follow-suit rule? I first explored inverting the standard rule (don't follow suit unless you have no other choice), and pushing it further to "don't play any suit already included in the trick, whether it was led or not" - so that the last player will often end up with only one option. I found that in that latter version, nearly every trick would be a one-of-each-suit trick; it's usually possible to obey the rule until the last couple of tricks in the hand, so there isn't much interesting strategy surrounding the case of not being able to follow it, and I couldn't make an interesting game out of that. I liked the idea of one-of-each-suit tricks being special, however, so I wanted to keep some of them. In play testing with different sets of rules it seemed clear that it was enough to let one-of-each-suit tricks happen naturally whenever players create them, rather than trying to force the matter.

Not having a follow-suit rule means players do not reveal much about their hands when they play. In a game with a follow-suit rule, a player who fails to do so is either breaking the rule ("revoking") or revealing that they don't have any cards of the suit led, which is useful information for the other players. In Diversity, playing or not playing a given suit will mostly be a tactical decision for a given trick and doesn't mean much at all about one's other cards. Although, as in most card games, there is still some value to players in keeping track of which high and low cards have been played or seen, the complicated strategies used in other trick-taking games of forcing other players to play or not play certain suits, do not apply here. The overall effect is to make the game more tactical and less strategic.

The lack of a follow-suit rule also means that leading to the trick ends up being a disadvantage. The leader does not get to see which cards the other players are about to play, whereas later-playing players can react to earlier-played cards. The last player to play to the trick quite often gets to decide who will take the trick. That's the reason for the break from the traditional rule of whoever takes a trick leading to the next one: in Diversity, forcing the trick-taker to lead next would often result in one player being stuck with the lead several times in a row, whereas with the stated rule of the player to the trick-taker's left getting the next lead, it means that whoever takes the trick will be in the strong position of playing last to the next trick, will be unlikely to choose themselves, and one player being forced to lead twice in a row will be a rare event.

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