Crafting cards & shedding cards

Ruins is a ladder-climbing & card-shedding game from Allplay, designed by John D. Clair - and you know what that means! Yes! 😁 Card-crafting, by layering transparent cards together in sleeves. The OG signature John D. Clair game mechanic, but in a quick shedding game!

How does it play? 🧐 For the ladder climbing: The 1st player plays a set of cards - a set here is one or more cards with the same value. The others can follow up with the same amount of cards with the same or higher value, or pass. But here comes the main twist!

When playing cards you can spend your 3 torch 🔥 tokens to buy upgrades for those cards. These could modify the value, let you draw and discard a card or make your opponents draw (which is strong in a shedding game), or it could make it so a card counts as two of the same. There are top, middle and bottom upgrades, and a card can have one of each - plus you have two ‘Claim’ upgrades that you can put on cards. During the setup of a round, players have to give you your claimed cards if they get them. This upgrade mechanic can help you match sets that you'd otherwise cannot match with the cards in your hands, adding much needed flexibility. 😉

Rounds go until all but one player runs out of cards. The sooner you go out, the more points you get. Each round players also get to flip a card from its Day side to its Night side, making it stronger. And the best part is that you'll play for 3-5 rounds, meaning that the upgrades stay and keep accumulating in the shared deck of cards, keeping gameplay exciting. 👍

As a caveat, you could feel while shuffling which card has 4 additional transparent plastic cards on top and which have none, but it's definitely not a deal breaker. My biggest complaint would be how hard it is to notice sometimes that a card has a value modifier - as those are mandatory modifiers, it's important to know. In summary we do really like the game and think that the card crafting twist adds a spin that no one has ever done in a card shedding game before 😊 One final note: It works at 2p, but really shines with 3 or 4 players!