Wikipedia talk:Trading card game/Rules proposal 5

Wikipedia: the card game that anyone can play

This section describes a co-operative card game where two to five editors aim to produce an excellent encyclopaedia. Rather than one player beating the others, they win or lose as a group as in Z-man's Pandemic (board game) and Repos' Ghost Stories[1]. The game involves playing cards rather than trading them.

The players represent editors working on four articles. They take turns in rotation (representing collaboration on Wikipedia from different time zones). Each turn consists of a negative phase, when the player carries out a mechanical process of discovering problems, followed by a positive phase, when he uses his skills and his colleagues' suggestions to improve matters. The only component is a pack of 52 special cards detailed below, each with a positive and a negative end. The game ends in victory as soon as all four articles reach GA or FA status, or in defeat if the cards run out before this is achieved.

To start the game, each player is dealt one card face up, which remains on the table throughout the game as a reminder. The player with the highest numbered card is the administrator who can protect articles, and will start the game. The other players are experts on the article shown on their card: art, geography, history or science. Each player is then dealt two cards face down which they pick up as their initial hand. For cards in hand, only the positive end is relevant.

Each article is represented by a group of cards in the centre of the table; each of those cards represents a section or a problem. An article with four sections and no problems is a GA. An article with five or more sections and no problems is an FA. All four articles are initially blank.

In the negative phase which starts his turn, the player turns over two cards and places each sideways across the article named. This article now suffers from the problem described on the negative end of the card. If he is unable to draw two cards, the game ends in defeat.

In the positive phase, the player has four hours to spend. In each hour he does one of the following:

• Add a section to an article
• Pick up a problem card
• Protect an article
• Give a card to another player
• Pass

A section consists of two cards from hand: a fact and either a source or a link. Facts and sources must be for the correct article, but links must be to one of the other three articles. Any player can add a section, but he must also discard one other card from hand as payment unless he is that article's expert. (Giving cards to an expert instead may enable them to be played later without a discard.)

Picking up a problem is the way to acquire new cards which can be played later in the positive sense. This action takes one hour for the article's expert or the administrator but takes two hours for anyone else.

Protection can only be carried out by the administrator. He can semi-protect a GA or fully protect a FA. (It is not necessary to make any article a FA to win the game, but it prevents problems which could reduce it below GA status.) Protection does not prevent problems but allows faster removal. Fixing a semi-protected GA takes one hour less (instant for the administrator; one hour for others). Fixing a fully protected FA is instant for all (a fast source of cards).

The deck contains the following 13 cards for each article (art, geography, history and science).

• 7 with positive end Fact with negative ends Advertising, Spelling, Grammar, Incomplete, Troll, Sockpuppet and Bias
• 3 with positive end Source with negative ends Copyvio, Unreliable and Outdated
• 3 with positive end Link with negative ends Spam, POV and Broken

Each card also carries a number from 1 to 52 for the sole purpose of determining the administrator. Graphically, cards resemble sections of a Wikipedia article. The fact cards show typical section headers for such an article, e.g. geography will have Transport, Culture, Wildlife, etc. These details add interest but have no effect on game mechanics.

Testers may wish to use a normal pack of cards with one suit representing each article and ranks indicating function: A-7=Fact, 8-10=Source, J-K=Link.

• Proposed by Certes (talk) 00:37, 9 March 2009 (UTC) (original version, which was too difficult to win), updated by Certes (talk) 00:29, 29 November 2009 (UTC).
• Discuss this proposal at Wikipedia talk:Trading card game/Action plan/Phase 1:Rules#Proposal #5.