The Mechanical Tournament Rules

Here's how to play The Mechanical Tournament!
Video: Soon

2-4 Players
10-20 Minutes

Shuffle the cards into 5 separate decks based on color.

Choose a player to go first, they draw a card facedown from any of the decks and put it facedown in front of themselves.

Each other player does this clockwise, then starting with the last player they choose a deck to draw from and others also draw counterclockwise.

Repeat those two steps until each player has 8 cards in front of themselves.

Facedown cards may be looked at by their owning player at any time, however they may not change the order of the cards, they must be in the same order as they were drawn.

Players now start taking turns.

On a player's turn they may first draw a card from any deck, if they do, they must remove a facedown card from in front of themselves from the game and replace it with the newly drawn card. 

Next they may switch the position of any 2 cards in front of a single player, or swap any 2 faceup cards in front of 2 different players.

Lastly the player must reveal their leftmost unrevealed card, should all the cards in front of all the players be revealed, the game ends.

When the game ends, each player then does each action on the cards in front of themselves from left to right, once all players have done this, the highest scoring player wins the game!

 

The Mechanical Tournament is ©2025 William van der Bokke. All rights reserved.