The idea
It's 1930s Chicago and you're moving agents up through the mafia. A rank lets someone new in only if their number fits the two members already there — the last digit of those two added or multiplied together. With no luck after the deal, it's closer to a puzzle than a game, and it's the heaviest one in the book.
Setup
- Take out the face cards and shuffle the 40 number cards.
- Deal five face-up columns of 9, 7, 5, 3 and 1 cards, left to right. These are the candidates for ranks 5 (lowest) to 1 (highest).
- From the rest of the deck, choose any 3 cards and place them above rank 5 as its members. Put the leftover cards away.
- Ace counts as 1 and Ten counts as 0.
How to play
- Pick a rank that has exactly 3 members and promote one of them: move it up a rank, as either a member or a candidate there.
- At the same time, move up a replacement from the rank's own candidates. Its value must be the last digit of the other two members' sum or product. (Members 5 and 4: a 9, or a 10 since 5 × 4 = 20.)
- No valid replacement means no promotion.
- A rank can only hold 3 members. If it gets a 4th, sacrifice one of them — it's out of the game. Candidates have no limit.
Winning, losing and score
- You win
- Promote someone out of rank 1.
- You lose
- You get stuck with no legal move, or give up.
- Score
- Count the sacrificed cards — fewer is better.