Golf

Golf is a game played with 2 to 6 players and with two standard 52 cards decks. It has nothing to do with the well known sport of the same name.
Its objective is to make as few points as possible by avoiding to accumulate cards of high value in one's own board.

Rules of the game

The board

Each player has his own card board in front of him, containing between 4 and 16 cards initially face down. These cards make his personal card board also called tableau. The objective is to turn up all cards of your board and to try to have as few points inside it, or to make an alignment of cards that count for 0 in that case.

Course of a turn

At your turn, you must:

  1. Draw a card, or take the card on top of the discard pile
  2. Replace an existing card of your tableau, face up or down, by the card just drawn or taken face up
  3. Discard the card that has just been removed from your tableau

You can discard the card you have just drawn if you aren't happy with it, if you didn't take it from the discard pile, but in that case, you must turn up a card of your tableau. Immediately discard the card just taken from the discard pile is forbidden, since it would basically mean a no-op or otherwise said, passing your turn.

You should avoid as most as possible to have high cards in your tableau, but if you manage to form a pair, three or four of a kind, horizontally, vertically or diagonally in a complete row or column, then these cards no longer count. Ideally, you should of course try to prevent other players from doing such alignments.

End of round

In order to finish the round, you must turn face up all the cards of your tableau. Once it's done, a final turn is given to each player and the round ends.

The player who's first to discover all cards of his tableau and thus make the round to end, must make sure that he has the tableau with the lowest total score.

For example, if Alice ends the round with 11 points while Bob had 9 and Cedric 17, Alice takes a total of 11 * 2 = 22 points. Other example, if Alice ends the round with 4 points while Bob had 5 and Cedric 3, Alice takes a total of 4 + 10 = 14 points.

As said above, an alignment of cards of the same rank don't count. Aces are worth 1, cards from 2 to 10 take their nominal value, jacks are worth 11, queens 12, kings 0, and jokers -3. Of course, all remaining cards still face down are turned up before counting.

When a player reaches a limit score, by default 100 points, he/she is out of the game. The winner of the whole game is the last player still in, or the one with the lowest score if all remaining players go out at the same round.

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