A downloadable game


Bartok 

These particular rules come from From Jeremy Gibson Bond's Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development.

Bond also programmed a version you can play online: 
Bartok Player-vs-Computer Web Build

Bartok is a "shedding" game in which players are working to get rid of the cards in their hand. There are a lot of games similar to it and you probably recognize it as Uno.

Objective

Be the first player to get rid of all the cards in your hand.

Getting Started

Here are the basic rules for Bartok:

  1. Start with a regular deck of playing cards. Remove the Jokers, leaving you with 52 cards (13 of each suit ranked Ace–King).
  2. Shuffle the deck and deal seven cards to each player.
  3. Place the rest of the cards face-down in a draw pile.
  4. Pick the top card from the draw pile and place it on the table face-up to start the discard pile.
  5. Starting with the player to the left of the dealer and proceeding clockwise, each player must play a card onto the discard pile if possible, and if the player cannot play a card, they must draw a single card from the draw pile.
  6. A player may play a card onto the discard pile if the card is either:
    1. The same suit as the top card of the discard pile. (For example, if the top card of the discard pile is a 2 of Clubs (2C), any other Club may be played onto the discard pile.)
    2. The same rank as the top card of the discard pile. (For example, if the top card of the discard pile is a 7 of Spades, any other 7 may be played onto the discard pile.)
  7. The first player to successfully get rid of all their cards wins.

Playtesting

Try playing the game a couple of times to get a feel for it. Be sure to shuffle the cards thoroughly between each playthrough. Games will often result in a somewhat sorted discard pile, and without a good shuffle, subsequent games may have results weighted by the nonrandom card distribution.

Iterating

Having gotten a sense for the base game, you can now make modifications to it! You can...

  • Add rules to existing cards
  • Create new turn-order procedures
  • Determine sitautions when players might "interupt" and play out of turn
  • Add whole new cards to the deck

Tips for Shuffling the Deck

Deblocking is the term for strategies used to break up groups of similar crds ("blocks"). In Bartok, each successful game ends with all the cards sorted into blocks of the same suit and blocks of the same rank. If you don’t deblock those groups, the subsequent game will end much faster because players are more likely to be dealt cards that match each other.

Here are some standard strategies for deblocking a deck of cards if standard shuffling doesn’t work:

  •  Deal the cards into several different piles. Then shuffle these piles together.
  •  Deal the cards out face-down into a large, spread-out pool. Then use both hands to move the cards around almost like mixing water. This is how dominoes are usually shuffled, and it can help break up your card blocks. Then gather all the cards into a single stack.
  •  Play 52 Pickup: Throw all the cards on the floor and pick them up.
  • According to mathematician and magician Persi Diaconis, seven good riffle shuffles should be sufficient for nearly all games; 4 if you run into issues, though, some of these deblocking strategies can help.

Source: Persi Diaconis, “Mathematical Developments from the Analysis of Riffle Shuffling,” Groups, Combinatorics and Geometry, edited by Ivanov, Liebeck, and Saxl. World Scientific (2003): 73–97. Also available online at http://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/Riffle.pdf.

Analysis: Asking the Right Questions

After each playtest, it’s important to ask the right questions, and each game will require slightly different questions, although many of them will be based on these general guidelines:

Is the game of the appropriate difficulty for the intended audience? Is it too difficult, too easy, or just right?

Is the outcome of the game based more on strategy or chance? Does randomness play too strong a role in the game, or, alternatively, is the game too deterministic so that once one player is in the lead, the other players don’t have any chance to catch up?

Does the game have meaningful, interesting decisions? When it’s your turn, do you have several choices, and is the decision between those choices an interesting one?

Is the game interesting when it’s not your turn? Do you have any effect on the other players’ turns, or do their turns have any immediate effect on you?

We could ask many other questions, but these are some of the most common.

Take a moment to think about your answers to these questions and write them down. If you’re playing the paper version of this game with other human players, it’s worthwhile to ask them to write down their own answers to the questions individually and then discuss them after they’re written; this keeps their responses from being influenced by other players.


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