🏠Cardbury

To win Cardbury, you need to complete the construction of four skyscrapers before pollution or over-population destroy the city, or you run out of cards to draw from the deck.

The game was designed by Iffix Y Santaph as an entry into Boardgame Geek's 2024 Traditional Deck Game Design Contest, with its rules available online.

I discovered the game courtesy of this Totally Tabled YouTube video.

The four skyscrapers are constructed by laying cards from a "foundation" upwards. All cards in a skyscraper must be of the same suit going up in value — getting narrower courtesy of my Inkscape graphics.

You start with a hand of three cards, and there are four face-down cards in each of the "construction sites" for skyscrapers. You start a skyscraper by replacing one of the face-up cards in your hand with a face-down foundation card. Once you've placed a card of a given suit in one of the four columns, only cards of that suit can be placed in that column for the remainder of the game.

The goal is to create a five-card high skyscraper in the first column, a four-card skyscraper in the second column, a three-card skyscraper in the third column, and a two-card skyscraper in the fourth column.

Each time you add a higher card to a skyscraper, two cards are added to your hand from the deck.

If the new cards drawn cause you to have three or more cards of any suit, these are discarded as "pollution" to the pollution deck. The number of cards in the deck doesn't matter, but once this happens the sixth time, you lose the game. Pollution also causes you to lose the game if it empties your hand — take that is fairly strong in this game, though it can be mitigated to a point with hand management.

While pollution reduces your hand, population reduces cards available to draw from the deck. For every set of four cards of each suit in your hand, one card is taken from the deck to the population pile. For every pair of cards of the same suit, that number minus one goes to the population pile. If the number of cards in the population pile gets bigger than the highest card in a skyscraper you lose the game.

If none of the cards in your hand can be used to build a skyscraper higher, you need to "dismantle" one by selecting it, resulting in cards getting discarded from it so one of the cards in your hand can be used for construction.

To win the game, you need to complete all four skyscrapers before the deck runs out assuming pollution and population growth don't get you first.