Buried Alive

Goal 

To have the least amount of dirt (cards) in your grave (possession).

Contents

2 dice, 1 deck of regular cards (no jokers)

Players

4 

Instructions for Playing

1. Divide your cards into suits.  Each suit becomes the player's hand.

2. Each round, a player will roll both dice.  Once the movement of the dice stops, all players throw down a card that matches that number as fast as possible.

3. The last player to throw down that card will put all the thrown cards into his/her "grave" - a stack of cards separate from his/her hand.

4. The Ace, Jack, Queen, and King are wild cards.  Throw them wisely.

5. If the player does not have the exact card or any remaining wild cards, they can throw down the card closest numerically to the dice roll.  Accuracy always trumps speed.

That's the 5 rule version of the 8 rule version of the 10 rule version of the game that Rex, Mike, Nate and I made from scratch in Saturday, October 23rd's class.  Quite a pickle to dill in my opinion.  For a brief moment we considered removing dice and cards from our game idea all together.  The class has come to rely on them as "basic game making  ingredients".  Actually, the entire world has.  Next time, I'd be up for doing a brain teaser type game.  Like "I Spy" with your eyes closed.  Or something that utilized the dry erase board.  I'm all for getting folks out of their chairs and animated.  In a game where speaking isn't allowed like "Pictionary" or "Win, Lose, or Draw", I find that the most hilarious thing is the how frustrated people get when they have to remain silent.  The artist does all sorts of pointing and jumping and face gymnastics trying to clue everybody into what they're drawing.  It's even better when the artist sucks at drawing.  It's a squiggle and a box and a big alien cat head looking thing.  That's supposed to be "Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time"?!   No way! (tilts head, squints eyes)  Well...okay, I....kinda see it, now.  Sorry.

We did make the act of throwing down your card as fast as possible an integral part of the game.  Nobody in the history of gaming has ever done that before.  Although, a bunch of prisoners playing Buried Alive in Sing Sing might be at each others' throats over "who threw what first", we remained civil and calm.  We had fun, but soon realized that writing down how to play in a short, simple, easy-to-understand manner was not fun.  We wanted to include "Exercise your common sense" as a rule, but refrained.  I'm sure game makers since the beginning of time wanted to include that rule.  Or "Don't be dumb".  But, you'd end up offending somebody somewhere and get sued for causing mental distress costing the game manufacturer hundreds of thousands of dollars in a long, messy televised court case.  You'd become the butt of gaming industry jokes and turn to a quiet, anonymous life of office data research.  Or you'd become famous.

All in all, we came up with a good game quickly.  Much better than this "Tetris" type game also called "Buried Alive" I found.  Go ahead.  Click on it.  You know you want to.  I won't tell anyone if you stay up until sunrise three nights in a row trying to beat it.

(if you get past level 4, leave an anonymous comment and tell me how you did it - I'm stuck)