MURDER! Welcome Back to Lucky Mansion
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
™ MURDER! Welcome back to Lucky Mansion. You and a collection of evil-minded people have gathered for a seemingly innocuous dinner party. It will be an evening of stimulating conversation, quiet music, and desperate murder attempts. Because each of you, unbeknownst to the others, wants to kill Doctor Lucky. Get Lucky is a card game adaptation of the classic board game Kill Doctor Lucky. Players control multiple murderous houseguests, each with a secret desire to take out the old man. But he’s not called “Doctor Lucky” for nothing. He’s more trouble than a bad habit and twice as hard to break. So gather around the card table and see who can Get Lucky! THE BASICS Components: Included in this package are 15 character cards, 57 game cards, this rules sheet, and one pawn to represent Doctor Lucky. The main rules are for 3 to 6 players. At the end, there are alternate rules for 2. The Object: Kill Doctor Lucky. That may sound easy, but he’s a singularly lucky fellow. Many at- tempts will fail before one succeeds. A Game in Synopsis: Each player has two characters. Progress There are three characters in the Drawing Room, the middle of the table. A deck and dis- card pile are beside the Drawing Room. With fewer than six players, there is an absent pile, showing the unused characters. Doctor Lucky moves from one character to the next, by the numbers. When Doctor Lucky moves to you, it is your turn. On your turn, you can do things that improve your characters, or you can try to kill Doctor Lucky. If you kill him, you win! RULES of the GAME SETTING UP Shuffle the character cards and dealtwo characters face up in front of each player. Put three more characters in the “Drawing Room,” the center of the table. (See the diagram above.) Set aside the remaining characters, if there are any, in an “absent” pile, which is also face up. With six players, there will be no absent characters. Shuffle the game cards and deal handa of six cards, face down, to each player. The rest of the deck becomes the draw pile, with space for a discard pile beside it. Place Doctor Lucky on the lowest numbered character that is controlled by a player (i.e., not in the Drawing Room or absent pile). That player will take the first turn. ON EVERY TURN On your turn, you may do exactly one of the following things: draw a card, play a card, swap a char- acter, or try to kill Doctor Lucky. Draw: Draw one card from the deck and add it to your hand. There is no upper limit to the number of cards you can hold. After you draw, your turn is over. The deck is never reshuffled or replaced, so after it is empty, you can’t draw anymore. Play: Play one upgrade card from your hand, attaching it to one of the characters in front of you. There are three types of upgrade cards: Weapons, Motives, and Opportunities. (The only other cards are Spite, which we’ll talk about later.) Upgrades are played as shown on the right. Any character may use any upgrade. However, each upgrade is perfect for a specific character, indicated by that character’s name and number on the upgrade. Usually, an upgrade is worth 1 point toward that character’s mur- der attempts. However, when paired with its perfect character, the upgrade is worth 2 points. To show everyone that you have a perfect upgrade, place the card sideways, as shown in the bottom example on the right. This makes it clear which cards are worth 2 points. A character can have no more than one of each upgrade type: one Weapon, one Motive, and one Opportunity. You may discard an imperfect upgrade to replace it with a perfect one. Aside from this, the upgrades are permanently attached. After you play a card, your turn is over. Swap: You may exchange one of your characters with a character in the Drawing Room. If there are any cards attached to a character, they move with it. (Doctor Lucky tags along too.) After you make the exchange, your turn is over. Kill: You can try to kill Doctor Lucky, but only with the character that he is visiting. Just declare that you are trying to kill Doctor Lucky, and your part is done. Then, each player gets a chance to play cards to stop you. If you fail, your turn is over. If you succeed, you win! Every murder attempt has a point value, based on the cards involved. You get one point for the character itself, plus one point for every imperfect upgrade. Perfect upgrades are worth 2 points, and Spite cards (described below) are worth -1. Even with no upgrades, a character can still make a 1-point murder attempt. In the example on the left, Johnny Archer has his perfect Motive plus an imperfect Weapon and Opportunity. His murder attempt is worth 5 points. Starting with the player on your left, and going around the table once, each player may discard one or more cards, or pass. Cards are discarded for their luck value, which is represented by 0, 1, or 2 shamrocks on the left side of the card. Each point of luck cancels out one point in the murder attempt, and if the attempt is reduced to zero points, it fails. Perfect Stops: Perfect cards are also perfect stops. An upgrade that matches the murderer is sufficient tostop any murder attempt by that character. So, for example, if the murderer is character 5, and you discard the Opportunity for character 5, you stop the murder attempt. (This is true even when that card has no luck on it.) Spite: Spite cards are only played to stop a murder. They are always worth one point of luck. After the attempt is resolved, they attach to the murderer with a permanent value of -1. With Spite, murderers can be weakened to a value of zero. Spite cards are tucked beneath the character, as shown on the right. In this example, with two Spite and a perfect Opportunity, Stacks McCracken can make a murder attempt worth 1 point. Strategy: You can play more than one card to foil a murder attempt, but the chance passes only once around the table. Of course, you usually do not want to discard any cards, so if you are early in the sequence, you may want to pass, and force others to discard. However, if you are the last player in sequence, you must stop the murder if you can! If enough luck is played to cancel the murder attempt, Doctor Lucky survives and your turn is over. If the attempt succeeds, you win! BETWEEN TURNS After each turn, Doctor Lucky moves to the next character in sequence. For example, if he is visiting 4, he moves to 5. If character 5 is absent, he moves to 6, and so on. From the highest number in play, he moves back to the lowest. If the next character is in front of another player, it becomes that player’s turn. If that character is in the Drawing Room, then it is no one’s turn, and players draw cards, as follows: Starting with the player who had the previous turn, each player draws a card, but only if they hold fewer cards than the number on the character that Doctor Lucky is visiting. For example, if Doctor Lucky is visiting character 7, players draw one card if they hold fewer than 7 cards. When the deck is empty, it is not reshuffled, and players can no longer draw. Be careful with the order when drawing (always start with the player who took the last turn), especially when the deck is nearly out. WINNING THE GAME You win when you kill Doctor Lucky. Pretty simple. Strategy: To succeed, you want to coax cards out of other players’ hands, without discarding too many cards yourself. You will do this by making murder attempts, and by judiciously passing when other people make attempts. However, it is not always correct to jealously guard your cards, as you will discover with experience. RULES FOR TWO PLAYERS To play the game with 2 players, you will make the following adjustments: Setup Changes: Each player starts with 3 characters and a hand of 8 cards. (The Drawing Room still has 3 characters, and the absent pile will have 6.) Murder Changes: After a murder attempt, the opposing player may pass some or all of the responsibility to an imaginary player named Howard. The live player always plays first, and then Howard tries to stop the murder by playing from the top of the deck. Howard will play up to X cards, where X is the amount of luck that was passed to him. For example, if Howard is responsible for 3 points of luck, he will draw up to 3 cards, stopping when the murder attempt is foiled. These cards go to the discard pile, except for Spite, which attaches to the murderer as usual. CREDITS Get Lucky would not have been possible without the generous support and contributions of our character models, artist, playtesters, and backers. Game Design: James Ernest and Rick Fish Graphics: Israel Evans and James Ernest Puzzles: Mike Selinker Character Models: BJ Becker as Doctor Lucky, Gordon Frye, Kaja Foglio, Nancy Frye, Anthony Gallela, Robert Gifford, Jen Page, Nathan Barnett, Carol Monahan, Pat Rothfuss, Payne Fifield, Phil Foglio, Marie Cooley, Angela and Aubrey Webber, Diana Vick, and Stephen Beeman Playtesting: Toivo Rovainen, Tom Saxton, Cathy Saxton, Carol Monahan, Nora Miller, Jason Mai, Joe Kisenwether, Zoe Miller, Robert Gifford, Don Flinspach, Ahna Blake, Jeremy Holcomb, Paul Peterson, Boyan Radakovich, Angela Webber, Ron McComb, Keith Nemitz, and many other beloved Cheapass Games Guinea Pigs Editing: Elizabeth Marshall, Cathy Saxton, and Mike Selinker Kickstarter Backers: This project had 2560 Kickstarter backers.