Extract Your House

Play a very basic 2-4 multiplayer version in browser: https://extract-your-house.onrender.com/

Inspired by the card game Regicide as well as the idea of Extraction,  the Scholomance novels, and the movie Monster House.

Extract as many members of your house (suit) as possible from the other houses by winning tricks or activating a suit's power.

Can be played with a standard deck of cards, from 2-8 players! (Try up to 16 players with 2 decks!) For each player over 4, they join one of the existing 4 houses.

Rules:

• Players are assigned a suit at random as their house,
• Players are dealt 7 cards
• The person to right of dealer is the one who starts the first trick
• Tricks are won by highest card, Ace being highest, 2 being lowest. Players who play their own suit get a + 1 to their card value. The earlier player of a card wins any ties.

• Tricks are played one card at a time so each subsequent player knows what was already played and can take that into account
• Whoever wins the trick puts the won cards into their house’s collection pile, face down and shuffled if desired.
• The goal is to have the most members of your house collected and safe at the end of the game. If less than the full number of players can participate in a trick near the end, then they are still on the hook for any applied powers, but besides that just watch the last few moves play out, until only 1 or 0 players have any cards remaining. Any cards remaining in the last player’s hand are lost to all.
• Each suit has it’s own special ability that applies if it is the lowest valued card on the table, except for spades which are always activated when played, since they are a defensive card.

• The Power of the lowest card is applied at the end of the trick, starting with the winner of trick and then clockwise, applying repeatedly until the value of the power card is expended (maxes out at 10 for face cards, and taking into account whether it was the suit/house of the player). The player of the power card can decide to spare any houses it desires from the power, up to 3 houses total in a game. If a player is shielded by a spade or being spared, they still eat up their part of the value of the attack card, but add +1 collateral to the total damage as it goes between every player besides the initiator of the power. After the power has been fully applied and the trick is finished, each player picks up one card from the shared collection pile while it is still non-empty. Whoever won the trick draws first and then draw clockwise.
• Whoever wins that trick starts the following trick.
• END state:
  • Deck is empty
  • 0-1 players have cards in their hand
  • (SKIP players who have no cards for their turn, but they are still on the hook for any relevant power effects)

4 suit powers

• Diamonds: Collect 1 card from each other house’s collection deck in clockwise order from the winner of the trick until the value of the card is equal to the number of cards collected, up to the max power value as defined above. These cards go into the applier’s collection.
• Hearts: Collect the value of the card up to the max power value from the general collection, or until collection deck is empty
• Spades: Protects against any attack cards that play out during the trick. AKA clubs and diamonds. Each shielded player still counts towards the total value of the damage card but + 1 is added to the total turns of damage.
• Clubs: Each other player chooses a card to go back into the general collection deck from their hand going round until the value of the card is depleted.
• Joker Power (not in digital version yet): When played in trick, it goes to winner of trick's collection deck, and after the trick all players hands are shuffled together and re-dealt evenly among the players. Joker is automatically chosen no matter what else is active. Applies at very end of trick, after the triggered suit power.