The idea
You're a city planner designing a ridiculous traffic interchange. Each grid space can hold a short stack of cards, and every card in a stack still counts — so one space can be part of several roads at once. Over three passes through the deck you try to weave a rising road of at least five cards for every suit.
Setup
- Take out the 12 face cards. Keep any 3 face up as round markers and put the rest away.
- Shuffle the other 40 cards into a face-down deck.
- Leave room for a discard pile, a market of 3 spaces, and a 3×3 play area.
- Turn one round marker face down: it's round one.
How to play
Refill the market
- Deal 5 cards face up into the market as three stacks: two stacks of 2 and one stack of 1. Always deal in the same pattern, before you look.
Draft and build
- Pick one market stack and discard the other two.
- Put your stack on any space in the 3×3 grid, on top of whatever is there. Fan the cards so every rank and suit shows, and keep their order.
- A space can hold at most 3 cards. If it has more, discard from the bottom until 3 are left.
New rounds
- When the deck runs out, shuffle the discards into a new deck (finish dealing the market from it if needed) and flip the next round marker.
- Play through the deck three times in all. If the third deck runs out mid-market, shuffle once more just to finish that market.
Winning, losing and score
- You win
- After the third pass, find the longest rising run you can trace for each suit, stepping to an orthogonally adjacent grid space each time (you may revisit spaces; height in the stack doesn't matter). You win if every suit has a run of at least 5.
- You lose
- Any suit's best run is shorter than 5.
- Score
- Add up the lengths of the four runs.