Kingdoms: Ascendance

A card game played with a standard 52-card deck (plus 2 Jokers). This is a hack of War which adds strategy without losing the spirit of the original game. In Kingdoms: Ascendance, wage war in a duel on 3 fronts, protect your castles, and weaken the opposing forces. Your goal is to earn cards and win wars, but as you continue to play, exhaustion starts to set in--forcing you to make compromises to your castles and pray that a war doesn’t occur. You always feel about as close to winning as you are to losing. The game is played in 3 phases: Draw Cards, Play Cards (initiate War), and Recruit. If a player is unable to draw up to their hand size, unable to contribute to War, or have only 1 castle standing--that player immediately loses. The game has no win condition, only 3 lose conditions. This reflects our own beliefs that war has no winners. Even when you have technically won the game, you may look down at your Kingdom and realize how much weaker it has become than when you started.