RogerBW's Blog

Teaching Grifters 19 February 2017

Today I'll introduce Grifters. Anything in square brackets is to be thought about rather than read aloud.

In this handbuilding game you'll be a crime boss – just as in real life. You'll be recruiting criminals to your gang, using their special abilities, and committing crimes, all the while trying to end up with the most money.

You'll start with three Masterminds and three random other specialists in your hand, and three money ("Isk", nothing to do with Eve Online). The rest of the money is in the Coffers.

On your turn, you do three things. First you Advance Time, moving anyone from Night Three of your hideout to Refresh, 2 to 3, 1 to 2, leaving 1 empty. Those Refresh cards will come back into your hand, but not yet.

Then you play one or more specialists from your hand, into the Night One space that's now empty. You can either play just one, to get the ability on the card, or play several of them together to commit a crime (a Job). If it's a Job, you choose one of the crimes that's visible at the top of the stacks, and play specialists with that many of the different symbols between them (the ones on your Masterminds look different, but they still count as one each). You take the card, and get the Reward listed on it; at the end of the game, if you have multiple Job cards of the same colour, you get extra money. (But one of the specialists can swap one of your Job cards for one of someone else's.)

If you play just one specialist, follow the text on the card. When it says you "duplicate" someone else's ability, that just means that you can use the ability yourself, rather than doing it twice. So for example if you play the Fall Guy, you're copying the power of a card that stays in your hand, while keeping that card in your hand so that you can play it next time.

Finally, you take the cards from your refresh area back into your hand. You don't draw any new cards unless you've played a card that lets you do that.

If we run out of specialists to draw, we shuffle the discard pile and continue. The game ends when the Coffers are empty, all the Jobs have been done, or the discard pile and the draw pile are both empty; at that point we tot up the money, and any job bonuses, to see who's won. There's no limit on your hand size.

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