Lautapelit Scout (Nordic)
SCOUT is a ladder-climbing game where the cards have two potential values, players may not rearrange their hand of cards, and players may advance from their turn to take a card from the current high deck of cards into their hand.
More specifically, the cards are double-indexed with different values on each half of the deck, with the 45 cards having all possible combinations of the numbers 1-10. During setup, the shuffler must randomize both the order of the cards in the deck and their direction. Once each player has received their entire hand of cards, they pick it up without moving the cards around; if they wish, they may rotate their entire hand of cards to use the values at the other end of each card, but again, they cannot move the order of the cards in their hand.
When a player takes a turn, they take one of two actions:
- Play: A player chooses one or more adjacent cards from their hand, all of which are of the same value, or have values in consecutive order (ascending or descending), and then they play this set of cards to the table. They can only do this if the table is empty (as on the first turn), or if the set they are playing is of higher rank than the set on the table; a set is of higher rank if it has more cards or has cards of the same value instead of cards in sequence, or has a set of the same quantity and type but of higher values. In the latter case, when a player overplays another set, the player takes the cards in this previous set and places them face down in front of them.
- Scout: A player takes a card from each end of the set on the table and places it anywhere in their hand in either direction. The player who played the previous set gets a 1 VP token as a reward for playing a set that was not beaten.
Once per round, a player can scout and then play immediately.
When a player has emptied their hand of cards, or all but one player has scouted instead of playing, the round ends. Players get 1 VP for each face-down card and then deduct one point for each card in their hand (unless they were the player who scouted repeatedly to end the game). Play as many rounds as there are players, and the player with the most points wins.