Sending the Royals to War is a fairly simple two-player card game played using a standard deck of cards (and nothing else!). If you’ve played Magic: the Gathering, a lot is going to feel very familiar.
The two decks can be built one of two ways, either split evenly, two of each card and a joker (if your deck has jokers) per deck, or in a draft.
If using the draft method, one person chooses one card from the full deck, then players take turns choosing two cards at a time to build their decks, until the first person takes the last card.
After building the decks, each player shuffles, draws five cards, and sets the remaining cards as the deck to draw from.
Turn order progresses as such:
When one player has run out of cards in their deck, the player with the highest value of unit cards on the field wins. In the case of a tie there, graveyard value is used. If still tied there, resource value is used. If you’ve tied there, you have well and truly tied and can rest satisfied knowing you’ve seen equality reign supreme.
Playing Units: Units (9-Ace) can be played by tapping resources greater or equal to the value of the unit minus three (eg, Ace, value 14, could be played by tapping a 7 and a 4 [or more, no penalty for going over])
Unit Types: There are three basic unit types, royals, towers, and assassins.
Royals: Jacks, Queens, and Kings. They have values 11, 12, and 13 as attack and defense, with a +1 bonus to attack for diamonds and clubs, and a +1 bonus to defense for hearts and spades, and are capable of attacking and defending. Support cards can be played on them in battle if it would “turn the tide of battle”.
Towers: 9s & 10s. They have values 9 and 10 as defense and that’s it. They can not attack, but attack and defense values both can be added as support if it would “turn the tide of battle”.
Assassins: Aces. Aces have a value of 14. In battle, assassins defeat any royal or other assassin regardless of their defense, unless the assassin is tapped and defending. Any damage dealt to an assassin defeats it. Assassins may attack the first turn they're played. Assassins can not defeat towers.
Resources / Support: Cards 2 - 8 of any suit can be played as resources to be tapped to pay for units or tapped to pay for support. As support cards, they must be played during battle when it will “turn the tides of battle” and are applied as a permanent buff to the unit supported, either with the card’s value added to attack for diamonds and clubs or defense for hearts and spades. The cost to play a support is the same as the card’s value or more (no penalty for going over).
Battle Details: On a player’s attacking phase, they choose any number of untapped units not played that turn to attack with and tap them. If the defending player has untapped units, they can choose which units to block with which (one unit per one unit).
Once battle is initiated, attack and defense is compared between units unless an assassin is involved. If either unit’s defense is exceeded by their opponent’s attack, they are defeated and sent to the graveyard… unless you play support cards to survive or at least take them out with you.
Once all untapped defending units necessary have defended, if there are more attackers, the attacking player decides who those units will attack, doled out between tapped defenders and the opposing player. Battle progresses as normal for tapped defenders, but if they are defeated, they do not deal damage to the attacker.
For every unit that deals damage to the defending player directly, the defending player discards a card from the top of their deck into their graveyard.
Jokers: Jokers can be played at any time to swap any two cards on the side of the person playing it’s hand, unit field, resources field, and/or graveyard
By Maya Zimmerman, inspired by the video How to Play Scoundrel on Youtube (https://youtu.be/7fP-QLtWQZs?si=LfFFJyVxI8pK0XTU). In all fairness, I did not watch the video before making the bulk of this game. I saw the concept of an advanced game played with a standard deck and said “Okay, I have to do that now” or rather a few days later. The cat got on my chair for a few hours today so I dug out the cards, spent a few hours developing the game and testing it, watched the video on my phone, and meditated on it and tested until I had access to my laptop again where I could write the rules. Okay, thank you for reading all this. I hope you enjoy the game.
Also, my friends and I used to play Magic four-player and I bet you could do that with two decks here. Okay, that’s it for real
Developed primarily on 2025/2/22 and tweaked on 2025/2/24.
House Rules: I've tried to leave some stuff open to interpretation. Consider how you want to play the game with some of these questions.
What counts as turning the tide of battle? Are there limitations?
Can people make their own decks? What kind of limits should there be?
Do support cards on units count towards points at the end?
Are resources reliant on color?
Do some cards have other abilities not outlined here?