GII Design Contest Winners!

Dragon Hunt follows in a long line of GII games that take the simple form of “get a hand, exchange some cards, do a few betting rounds, then show hands and see who wins”. What makes this game fun and interesting, however, is that you’re hunting a dragon, but you don’t actually know what kind of dragon (i.e. color) you’re hunting until partway through the game!

The main ways you score points are with cards matching the dragon’s color, and with “rank diversity”. In other words, a hand with many different ranks is much better than a hand of all rogues (or even all warriors, for that matter!) Several variants are also available to tweak scoring and change the incentives around a bit.

This game is easy to learn, flavorful and fun, so we’re very happy to award our top prize ($300 and a copy of the upcoming game) to David. Congratulations!

Rank and Class is a Rogues and Warriors variant that kinda made us smack our foreheads and go “of course! Why didn’t we think of that?” Normally in Rogues and Warriors, you get two cards and the best hand wins. Easy peasy. In Rank and Class, everything works the same, with one critical difference. Instead of looking only at your own cards, you are dealt two cards – one of which only you can see, and the other of which only everyone else can see. In other words, you get two cards and look at one of them, but you hold the other one up to your forehead so you can’t see it, but everyone else can.

Turns out, this small change makes the game quite different and super interesting! Thanks, Jay!

Finally we have Streets of Greyport by Todd Christopherson. In this game, you’re loading up your cart with various kinds of goods (cards), and are pressing your luck, getting as many cards of the same color as you can into your cart before hitting three rogues. You then move cards to your warehouse, and the player with the most total rank points in their warehouse at the end of the game is the winner! This game caught our attention because it was quite different from any existing GII games, so we’re happy to give it the accolades it deserves.