New Card Game: Kathmandu

Kathmandu
2-player card game
Designed by Rey Alicea

Object

To score the most points after three rounds by arranging the entire hand into melds.

Materials

52 card regular deck
22 tokens in two colors, 5 red and 17 blue
A way of keeping score

The Deck

A 52 card regular deck, ranked A-K-Q-J-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-A.

The Deal

The dealer shuffles the deck and one at a time deals out face down 10 cards to each player. The rest of the cards are placed face down in the center of the table forming the draw deck. Also each player places 1 red token and places it in front of them.

Next place the remaining 3 red tokens adjacent to the draw deck and spaced about a card width apart from each other on the tableau. Then draw 2 cards from the draw deck placing them face up and adjacent to the red tokens.

The blue tokens are placed nearby so that both players can easily reach them.

Melds

Melds come in two flavors.

Group – Three or four cards with different suits and the same rank.
Sequence – Three or more cards of the same suit with ranks in sequential order.

The Play

The game is played in three rounds.

The non-dealer starts, turns alternate.

A player on her turn must take one of the following actions.

1. Exchange a meld from your hand with a blue token, these cards are placed face down forming a discard pile or

2. Exchange cards from your hand with red tokens from the tableau, these cards are placed face up to the tableau or

3. Take all of the red tokens from the tableau, replacing them with the same number of cards from the draw deck, these cards are placed face up to the tableau or

4. Exchange any number of red tokens with an equal number of cards in your hand to the tableau or

5. Exchange any two cards from the tableau with two cards from your hand.

Players may have no more than 10 cards in their hands during play.

The game ends when either the draw deck is empty or all the blue tokens have been taken.

Scoring

Each blue token is worth 5 points each. Each red token is worth -2 points each and each card left in a player’s hand is worth -1 point each. Tally each player’s scores per round. Then tally each player’s final scores per round, the player with the highest score wins.