Whose Faulty Vision

Idea File: “Parents are Coming” card game

I came up with this great idea for a card game while sitting in a meeting this morning.

The premise is, the players are all college students or twentysomethings who are living together. Their parents are all coming for a visit at the same time, and they’re frantically trying to hide everything they don’t want them to see–porn, drug stuff, whatever. Trouble is, there are only so many places to hide things, and everyone has stuff they want to hide…

There’s no board. The hiding places are a set of cards, shuffled and placed in a grid face down, like “concentration.” Each hiding place has a room that it’s in (bedroom, bathroom, kitchen or “other”), and a size from 1 to 10. Each player is given a stack of 10 object cards, which they turn over one at a time. Each object has two rooms it can be hidden in, and a size from 1 to 5. Each hiding place can hold up to its size, so in a hiding place of size 8 (that’s a big one, like “under the bed”), you could put a size 5, a size 2 and a size 1 object. But each player can only put one object in any given place.

Normally the hiding places are all face down, and you turn over one place at a time to look at it and decide if you want to hide something there. But once you’ve hidden something in a place, it gets turned face up, so other players can easily see if there’s room there to hide more things.

Sounds pretty simplistic, right? Here’s the cool part–there are no turns. Everyone’s playing all the time. So there’s a frantic scramble for the best hiding places, peering under cards, trying to figure out where the best place to put your stuff is. For instance, if you have a small object you need to hide, and you find a big hiding place, you may want to remember where it is and save it, because if you hide your small object there then other players can use the remaining space for their big objects, and you’ve helped them out.

A round ends when the first player runs out of things to hide. At that point, the parents show up, and each player who still has cards remaining scores humiliation points equal to the total size of the remaining objects. After a pre-determined number of rounds, the player with the lowest score wins.

I think it’ll be fast-paced, use some memory and a little bit of strategy, and should be fun.