Scoundrel

Credits

Thank you to Riffle Shuffle & Roll for showing me this game. Thank you to Rulies for making a nice to follow guide.

Scoundrel is a card game that you are able to play with just ordinary stocks of cards. For more games that you are able to play with ordinary stocks of cards, I made a list of them.

setup

Grab a standard 52 card deck. Remove the jokers and all red face cards and both red aces from the deck, these are unused. The other cards are your dungeon.

It is advised to grab a D20 as your health counter, but anything else that can display your health from 1-20 also works. Pen and paper also works.

Make sure to shuffle the deck well, if you grab a flush, you will most likely die in the dungeon.

Once it’s shuffled, place the pile face down on your left.

You start the game with 20HP.

terms

• Spades and clubs are monsters
• Diamonds are your weapons
• Hearts are health potions
• The Dungeon is a series of rooms
• A room is made of 4 cards

how to play

Start by drawing your first room by laying down 4 cards in front of you.

At the start of each room you get a choice, you can face it or you can avoid it.

If you choose to face the room, you must interact with 3 of the 4 cards in the room, 1 at a time. After you interact with 3 cards, you enter the next room by combining the remaining card with 3 newly drawn cards. If you decide to avoid the room you’ll take the room, and put the 4 cards at the bottom of the pile. This means you’ll have to face it again at some point. There is no limit to how many rooms you can skip, but you cannot avoid 2 rooms in a row.

The official rules say that when you avoid a room that you’ll have to pickup the 4 cards in 1 scoop and put them at the bottom of the pile, this means that you can’t take your time to align them how you want. That said, if you get good at scooping them up in 1 motion, you might still be able to influence the order.

interacting with a card

Card Values

Number cards have their number as value:

• A 2 of spades is 2 strength
• A 8 of clubs is 8 strength
• A Jester is 11 strength
• A Queen is 12 strength
• A King is 13 strength
• An Ace is 14 strength

You can choose 1 card at a time in any order you want.

• Spades and clubs are monsters, their strength is equal to their card values.
• Diamonds are weapons, if you choose 1 you have to equip it. Weapons take damage equal to their value.

When fighting a monster you can fight it bare handed or with a weapon if you have 1 equipped.

Bare handed means that you take the full hit, that means you subtract the value of the card from your HP.

Bare Handed example

It is your first round and this is your room:

• A 2 of clubs

• A 5 of Diamonds

• A 10 of Spades

• A 6 of clubs

  You decide to attack the 2 of clubs bare handed. You will take 2 damage and your total health is now 18HP.

When you fight a monster using your weapon, the weapons value gets subtracted from the monsters strength. If your weapon is stronger, you take 0 damage. Once a monster is slain with a weapon, place it on top of your weapon. From then on, this weapon can only be used on monsters weaker than the last one you defeated. The damage never changes, just what it can hit changes.

1st weapon attack example

It is your first round and this is your room:

• A 2 of clubs

• A 5 of Diamonds

• A 10 of Spades

• A 6 of clubs

  1. You select the 5 of diamonds as your weapon.
  2. You decide to attack the 10 of Spades with your weapon. You subtract 5 from 10, and you will take 5 damage. So now your total HP is 15.

If you choose a new weapon, you must equip it, there is no choice. This means discarding your old weapon + it’s defeated monsters. This means that sometimes you are forced to discard a good weapon for a bad one.

You don’t need to use your weapon if you have one, if your weapon is an unused 10 of diamonds, you probably don’t want to attack a 2 of spades with it, it’d be a waste.

attack playthrough attack example

It is your first round and this is your room:

• A 2 of clubs

• A 5 of Diamonds

• A 10 of Spades

• A 6 of clubs

1. We select the 5 of diamonds as our weapon.
2. We decide to attack the 10 of Spades with our weapon. We subtract 5 from 10, and we will take 5 damage. So now our total HP is 15. We place the monster on our weapon.
3. We decide to attack the the 6 of clubs with our weapon. We subtract 5 from 6 and we’ll take 1 HP damage, our total is now 14. We place the monster on our weapon.
4. We draw a new room:

• A 2 of diamonds
• A 10 of Diamonds
• A Jester of Clubs

5. We equip the 2 of diamonds and discard our old weapon + it’s defeated monsters.
6. We attack the 2 of clubs with our weapon, 2-2 = 0 damage. We place it on top of our weapon.
7. We equip the 10 of diamonds and discard our old weapon + it’s defeated monster.
8. We draw a new room:

• A King of Clubs
• A 2 of Spades
• A 4 of Diamonds

9. We attack the king with our weapon. 13- 10 = 3. We take 3 damage and our total now is 11HP. We place the monster on our weapon.
10. We now attack the Jester of clubs with our weapon. 11 - 10 = 1, we take 1HP damage. Our total is 10HP. We place the monster on our weapon.
11. We attack the 2 of spades bare handed, we take 2 damage and our total HP is now 8HP. we discard the monster.

We did this so that we can still use our good weapon later on.

And finally we have potions, health potions restore your HP to the value of the card. 10HP + A 5 of Hearts means that your total is now 15HP. You can only use 1 health potion per room, and your max HP is 20. If you are forced to pickup a second potion in a room, it is wasted.

endings

You die if your health reaches 0.

If you reach a point where you can’t enter a new room (there is less than 3 cards left to fill your next room), you have won.

Scoring

Live or die, you still get a score. If you died, add up the value of all the monsters you didn’t reach. Don’t count the monster that killed you, it is discarded after it damages you. The total value of the remaining monsters becomes your negative score.

If you make it through, your score is however much health you have left. If you finished your game with 20HP, and the last card in the last room being a health potion, add it’s value as a bonus.

This means that your score will be between:

Points
30	Top score, 20HP + 10HP health potion in the last room.
20	You won scratch free.
1	You survived
-30	You were close
-208	The worst score you can get.

Possible Varients

Merchants

Leave the Jokers in. Whenever you come across one, that’s a merchant! You can sell one weapon to a Merchant for an immediate health boost of equal value.

This means A 5 of Diamonds will grant you 5HP.

Diminished weapons have lesser value of course, and only grant HP equal to their lowest ranked slain monster when sold. Once you sell to a merchant once, they leave and never return, as with most other cards.

This means that A 10 of Diamonds that has attacked A 5 of Spades will only give you 5HP. And of course if the slain monster is higher than your weapon: A 4 of Diamonds that attacked A 10 of Clubs will only return 4HP because the weapon value doesn’t scale up.

Rules by four

The evil merchant

I followed the comments and added Jokers as merchants and diamond face cards as blacksmiths and found it a little easy so now the black joker is a evil blacksmith who steals your weapon immediately unless you can run from the room.

Rules by lpharmer3496

_{No, his rules aren’t racist. The black cards in this game are already monsters whilst the red ones are good cards, so it makes sense this way.}

Blacksmiths

Add the diamond face cards back into the deck. They are the “Blacksmiths”. They each let you remove a certain amount of monster cards from your weapon to repair it. (Jack:1 Queen:2 King:3)

This gives you more headroom and makes the game feel more fair.

Rules by Thatkidwhotalkstoomuch

Party members

I added the red jacks back to the deck as recruitable party members. Jack of Hearts can hold a potion for future use, and Jack of Diamonds can equip a weapon himself, increasing your strategic options in combat (essentially allowing you to be more efficient with your weapons). This also reduces the density of black cards slightly, so should prove to reduce bad luck streaks.

It would be interesting to expand upon this by using your score at the end of the dungeon as a way to gain experience to level up and tackle harder dungeons later!

Rules by StartTheDayWithKeele

The home rules pack

After looking at these comments I’ve started using a couple of the home rules they did (But I made some minor edits so they’d work together).

• The diamond face cards as the Blacksmiths (exactly how romanallgeier4661 did, so the Jack gets rid of one monster card off of an equipped weapon, Queen 2, King 3, and Ace all). Also, if a weapon has no durability loss, you can place a blacksmith under it to give it a bonus based on the value of the blacksmith, Jack is +1, Q +2, K+3, A+4. Being upgraded by an Ace also means that the weapon can attack an enemy that it one greater than its durability allows (this bonus is kinda situational but when it pays off it feels awesome and it means you can chain back up if you set it up right)
• The heart face cards as merchants as 4TheWizard said, with them allowing you to ‘sell’ weapons for health back, but with the amount of health back being the power of the weapon minus the amount of monster cards attached (with a lower cap of one health gained of course) plus a bonus based on the relative value of that face card (with jack having no bonus, queen adding 1 extra health, king adding 3 extra, and ace adding 5).
• The party member idea of StartTheDayWithKeele could be used by the jokers, the red joker carrying potions that could be used later and the black joker carrying weapons so that you’d have more options in combat (tho he’d only be able to do combat that results in him not taking any damage or he dies and is discarded) or you could also (as if you have a d20 you probably have a full set of DnD dice) you could use a d8 (or some other value depending on what you think his health should be) and give him hp independently. Just wanted to put all of these ideas in one place as I thought they were really fun and meant I didn’t have to search through all my cards each time looking for the red face cards lol. Also, for these rules, if you come across a diamond or hearts face card and are unable to or don’t want to use them for any reason then you can recycle them into a random part of the deck (they don’t have to go to the back because they can wander around the dungeon—this also means that if you run away from a room they won’t go in the back, but will go somewhere random in the deck), but if you use one then it is gone forever.

Rules by WaughinJarth