Do you hear the wind in the branches? The chirping birds? Can you feel the warmth of the air having crept back from its hidden places, that familiar golden glow leaking through your windowblinds? How the air smells of tree pollen, and that smoky, distant odor of the Corn Goblins roasting mice and lost children somewhere off in those immeasurable, sweeping fields. The frozen heart of the earth slowly swells to wet movement again, and all the creatures crawl out of their caves to do their dubious deeds. Yes, early summer! Or spring, if you're a dipshit who likes that kind of season. Those thawing days never far from memory all year round. Near-enough to exactly one year ago, I came to you all with a simple proposition. And now, I return, to propose again.
Yes, that time of year has come around. It's that magical season! Time for another round of CYS's 3rd favorite cardless cardgame! It has RETURNED! With new rules, new features! At least 3 more cards! BY POPULAR DEMAND:
The only game that can make you SHIT IRL.
It's time for a game of...
Now, the new or productive among you might be wondering, what exactly is Blacksmith? Well, it's a very simple little fill-in-the-blanks-style pitch game, like snake oil or superfight, where you use carefully selected materials and blueprints to create exactly the kind of weirdly-enchanted, specialised weapons you might find in a roguelike or an oddly-written pulp fantasy. With your ingenuity, you will battle other players to win the most customers. Or the most lulz, whichever one is most valuable to you!
Here's how you play:
Each player draws 2 of each card type, and then an additional one (the "bonus card") the type of their choice: Materials, Items, Prefix Descriptors, and Suffix Descriptors.
For an example of how these would be put together, |Blessed|Brass|Rope Dart|Of the East|
Players are allowed to mulligan at any time between rounds, at the cost of forfeiting their bonus card on the next draw.
Players will take turns in order of who joined first to be the "Customer". They will read out a "Quest" card which describes the potential customer and their needs.
For example,
"Plague doctor needs new surgical equipment after their last dysentery patient exploded."
And then the other players would submit and describe their inventions- Have fun with your interpretation, just try not to veer too far away from what the actual card (the prompt, if you will) is saying! To avoid this becoming a game of people inventing the most all-encompassing magical multitools or just extremely overpowered weapons, the Customer is advised to pick the one best suited to their specific situation. As well as what they think would be funny.
The rest pretty much proceeds as this sort of concept-pitch game always does. After the winner is declared, all players who spent cards this turn will discard their cards to the bottom of all relevant piles and then draw from the decks until their hands contain the original amount of cards. (Though if the "additional" one was spent, the player is allowed to pick a third of a different type.) The winner is awarded the judge's card, and the first one to get up to a number picked before the game starts wins. At least, that's how it would work if this were a real card game. But since we're playing this over the internet, we have to get a little bit meta and honor-system-ey.
Because I dream of someday playing this game myself, the way to play it on an internet forum has been revamped. This is so anybody in the future, if they want, can start a game of Blacksmith by themselves at any moment, without one player always being sort of on the side of the game simulating the deck of cards as it would be played in real life.
Here is the Random Card picker I use! It comes with a random item generator of its own, both for utility in running the game, and because it's funny.
https://perchance.org/vhuap91ydn
Now, the game will proceed with whoever started this game dealing everybody a hand from the "YOUR HAND IS:" line. All cards are dealt in the order of *[Prefix]* *[Material]* *[Item]* *[Suffix]*, or in the case of "YOUR HAND IS" *|Prefix|* *|Prefix|* *[Material]* *[Material]* and so on. Since some cards have a lot of words, all of them have been marked with asterisks to show where one ends and another begins. Remember, a full hand consists of two of each kind of card, and one bonus card! If there are repeat cards, you are instead to replace the copy with an item of the same kind from the "YOUR RANDOM ITEM IS:" line. Because of the nature of how I plan for this game to be run, it will be impossible for everyone to catch all duplicate cards made by this infernal machine, but everybody try your best and it'll be fine. The Dealer (and every customer after him) will also PM the "YOUR CUSTOMER IS:" scenario to the next customer for them to write up the appropriate spiel in the game thread and get the blacksmiths thinking.
Importantly, the original "dealer" will abstain from the first round, for maximum fairness. All future rounds will be "dealt" by the previous customer, with the players of that round PM'ing them which cards they need to restore their hands, (If it's only one, give them the card of that type from the RANDOM ITEM. If it's two, give them both cards from the YOUR HAND IS. If it's three, give them all cards of that kind from both. If any of the cards you need to give the other person are repeats from previous points in the game, refresh the generator!) and the dealer being PM'ed their hand by the first customer. Does that make sense? I hope it does. Post your questions if it does not make sense! I will draw diagrams if I have to.
As far as card syntax rules, I'll say that a creation doesn't need to be just one of each card in that specific order. At bare minimum, it can be two cards. At maximum, I'd say 5. As long as it makes grammatical sense for what you're proposing, you can even use materials as items and vise versa, since they're both nouns. You could, say, use "Cake Sword" to mean your sword is made of cake, or "Sword Cake" for a cake made of swords. I don't want to be too restrictive, if your creation makes some kind of grammatical sense, it should be legal. If anything's dancing on the edge, remember that one of the oldest unwritten rules of Cystia is that anything funny is legal at least once.
We'll need 4 (including me) to 6 people to play this game, and the first person to 3 points wins... 15 Golden Frijoles! But of course this kind of game is rarely ever about the score, is it?
