Game Mode Idea: Landmines [flexible difficulty]

[pianoblook]

Landmines

• After starting hands are dealt, shuffle [x] Landmines into the deck (or I guess it might be easier to code as something like, "Landmine cards cannot appear in the top 15/20 cards of the deck, depending on the number of players").
• Once drawn, Landmine cards become Activated, and must be either played or discarded within two rounds* in order to be successfully Deactivated.
• If a player starts a THIRD* turn of holding the same Active Landmine, it Explodes: instead of taking their normal turn, they are forced to automatically play that Landmine, causing a Strike. (They then immediately draw a new card like normal.)

*= This could be fiddled with. Maybe 3 rounds / explodes on the fourth is more reasonable? hard to say without testing

Random Nitpicky Rules

• Discarding a Landmine (probably?) does not give a clue back.

mainly because otherwise you might feel obligated to just play with Sieve conventions, in which case the extra cards might actually end up just being advantageous, lol

• Playing a Landmine does NOT cause a Strike, but does not add to the Score.
• The game still ends normally; any remaining Landmines are immediately Deactivated, causing no harm.

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Gameplay Options

• I propose two levels of Intensity: Normal (1 Landmine per Suit), and Hardcore (2 Landmines per Suit).
• As for how Landmines can be clued, I also propose two options, offering different difficulties:

A) Each existing suit simply has 1 or 2 Landmines added to the mix, and are treated as 'Brown' versions of that suit. (e.g. in a normal Landmines (5 Suits) game, there's one red Landmine, one yellow, etc., each of which is only cluable by color. B) Stealth Landmines: the Null version.

[Krycke]

So landmines are extra cards in each suit ie three 1s, two 2s... plus one landmine?

[pianoblook]

So landmines are extra cards in each suit ie three 1s, two 2s... plus one landmine?

Either that, or the simpler option would just to make them Null / not associated with any suit in particular.

Or if it's easier to code I guess they could be 'their own suit'. I didn't try to think too hard about what would be the easiest to implement.

[Krycke]

Either i guess, i was more thinking that you mean that they have their own cards and not like r2 is also a landmine that you have to defuse.

[Romain672]

So the point of it is to force people to come with ways of discarding newest. We got that with Referential Sieve, but not that in hgroup at all.

One of the potential problem is that it can make discarding newest likely, and so you could assume it to be the norm after your artificial limit of 15/20 moves.

To counter that, it could be possible to create a function which make it very likely to have at most 1 landmine in the first 10 cards of the deck (maybe 2 if you are very unlucky), with the probability slowly increasing over time.

[pianoblook]

So the point of it is to force people to come with ways of discarding newest. Well no, I'd assume more often that they get bluffed/Ejected.

Discarding them don't even give clues back, for exactly this reason. From the OP:

mainly because otherwise you might feel obligated to just play with Sieve conventions, in which case the extra cards might actually end up just being advantageous, lol

[pianoblook]

Although tbf, I think it's awesome when a variant or game mode can inspire people to try new conventions, so overall I look forward to what creative solutions people might come up with.