Phoenician Mouse Bolt

It's Egyptian Rat Screw!

The theme: "card brawl." I have fond memories of playing Egyptian Rat Screw at school when I was younger. It has twitch-based gameplay unlike a lot of traditional card games.

Players are dealt all of the cards in a 52 card deck. They take turns flipping the top card of their deck and putting it in a center face up pile. The game proceeds like War--if a player plays an Ace, King, Queen, or Jack, the next player in turn has 4, 3, 2, or 1 chances to play an Ace, King, Queen, or Jack themself. If they fail to do so, the player issuing the challenge gets the pile!

Additionally, players can slap the pile to steal it if the top cards match a certain pattern: doubles (the two cards were played last have the same rank), tens (the last two cards' ranks add up to 10 (Aces count as 1), sandwiches (the third-last card and last card played have the same rank), and four-in-a-row (the last four cards played are sequential, and can wrap around from King to Ace in either direction).

In addition, I wanted to include elements that mimic playing the game in real life. Players take turns playing cards, and a player is free to play a card in the brief moments while someone's arm is coming down to slap. If the card makes it to the pile before the hand, the pile's pattern will be evaluated as such, but if the hand gets there first, the played card is bounced back to the bottom of its owner's pile. Also, players must "claim" the pile after they win a war with an Ace, King, Queen, or Jack--the last played cards might form a pattern and could be slapped and stolen unless the winner claims it before that happens.

I put a cooldown on the slap which will require a player to wait 2 seconds before slapping again if they slap where there is no pattern on the top of the pile. This discourages spamming the slap.

I didn't:

- add slapping AI to AI opponents

- add avatar/profile humans for the AI opponents

- do any music or sound