Kindling

A shared deck of dry wood and frost. Flip cards to your sled; after each, push or stack. Frost takes the whole sled; dry wood banks by colour; and a pile five high FREEZES and scores nothing — the drift buried it. First to twenty-one lights the stove. Every flip is public, so the count is the whole game: how much frost is left, how much of each colour, and how deep the drift already sits on your piles.

How it feels

• A count you can feel in your teeth
• One card too many
• The drift is patient

What the design is for

• 01

  The count is the game

  Every flip is public and every discard is public, so the deck’s remaining multiset is a subtraction anybody can keep — and the board keeps it for you: cards left, frosts left. Pushing is worth exactly what the count says it is worth.

• 02

  The drift

  A pile five cards high freezes and scores NOTHING — the whole pile, not the fifth card. So a sled can be worth LESS than nothing: the fifth card onto a four-high pile buries the four beneath it, and the board says which way the score went rather than calling the card harmless.

• 03

  The sled is all-or-nothing

  Stacking banks the whole sled, frost loses the whole sled, and the deck is shared: every card you push past is a card they cannot have. The classic push-your-luck bind, with the other player’s share of the deck as the tax on cowardice.

• 04

  No dice anywhere

  The shelf’s dice games roll; Kindling counts. The only randomness is the deal — after that, every frost that comes up was one you could have known was in the deck, and probably did.

• 05

  Taught by losing a sled

  Six steps: the first flip, the bust you walk into on purpose, the stack that lands by colour, the drift you refuse to bury, the count that says stack — and then the whole winter to yourself. Every step but the last accepts one move: the one it asks for.