triple sabotage
oVERVIEW
Triple Sabotage is a strategy and luck game that I designed using a standard deck of playing cards.
The objective of the game is to deplete your hand and table of cards before the other player(s) do.
The full rules can be
downloaded here.

Each turn, players must play a card from their hand that is numerically greater than topmost card on the active pile.

Since it's unpredictable when your hand will be swapped, players can't get too comfortable with their current hand.

Some cards have special effects.
For example, playing a 3 causes you to switch hands with the next opponent.
In the last stages of the game, players don't know what their last cards are. This means that the first player to get to their last three cards is the first player to lose the ability to strategize.
This is a negative feedback loop implemented to allow for losing players to still have a chance to win.

Since it's unpredictable when your hand will be swapped, players can't get too comfortable with their current hand.

"initial sabotage"
In the initial design of the game, players would switch their own cards, not their opponent’s.
Little did I know that this mechanic already existed in the game "Palace", so I had to add the Initial Sabotage stage of the game.
This ended up contributing greatly to making this game unique, as in the previous iteration of the game, players stored their power-up cards in their own slots. This resulted in a much more predictable and faster-paced ending to the game.
Switching the opponent's cards instead would force the player to maintain a balance between some choices:
-
Making the game harder in the later stages by reducing the pool of unplayed power-ups very early in the game, thereby increasing the stakes
-
Keeping the game moving by keeping power-ups available in the late game at the cost of giving their opponent access to these power-ups