How to Play Wicked Grace - The Rules
Alright. As promised, I will finally go into trying to fully construct how to play Wicked Grace. I spent this week overthinking this game and annoying pretty much everyone I know with my ramblings about this game. I went so far mainly about what the full deck looks like, and about the card values within it. And let me quickly update the list of cards, as I changed around some of the card names to fit better with the established lore.
So, let me quickly for once list up the cards. In my analysis the Wicked Grace card game is a card game with a deck of 4 suits, each of them featuring 15 cards, making the deck 60 cards in total. The suits are Serpents (also called Drakes), Angels (also called Spirits), Knights (also called Blades) and Songs.
Other than with a Poker Deck, the cards are not mainly the same in every suite, but unique to every suite, as rather than focusing on numbers, they are focusing on mythological and magical themes. The cards are:
Other than suits, the cards have themes. I am going to assume that primarily the cards usually are considered to have three different themes: Emotions/Spirits, Cycles of Nature, and Higher Powers. I am going to assume the Flower Cards are going to be considered Jokers, and can be counted to each theme as wanted.
However, within each theme, there is also always cards that are very closely related in the Cycles of Nature and the Higher Powers, while among the Emotion themes at least the positive and negative emotions can be grouped together. Just keep that in mind, as I go into the further rules! đ
I reckon that the game given that it seems to have 60 cards could be played with up to 12 people, though in that case I am going to assume the rules would need to be adjusted given that you definitely can swap out cards. It might however be â we see that in the scenes â that in those cases there might just be a way of exchanging cards between the players.
However, assuming we have six or less players, I do reckon that the game usually goes like this:
Everyone receives five cards.
Every player can switch cards, putting cards from their own hand onto the table and either drawing from the deck, or taking cards from the pile of cards discarded by other players before. (I am going to assume, that the cards are always face down and that playing them face up, as you can see it some people do in the game, is considered cheating.)
Every player gets a chance to switch out cards in the same order (probably clockwise or counter clockwise).
Once a person places a bet, everyone else can either go along or forfeit.
After the bet is placed, everyone has one chance to swap cards one more time â after that last swap deciding on whether to hold the bet or not.
After everyone has either gone in or dropped out, the cards of everyone in are compared and the person with the highest rated hand gets to take the betted money (or whatever everyone is betting on).
I am assuming this will then be repeated until nobody has anything left to bet with. As it often is with such gambling!
Now, the final question is: Who wins?
Firstly, the table I am using above can be found in GoogleDocs. You can use it, if you want to.
Now, it does seem reasonable to assume, that generally speaking some of the rules of Poker apply. We know that much from the dialogue. To be exact we know:
Having two of the same suit is a pair, and gives points.
Having three of the same is a triple and gives points.
From this I am going to assume that having four or five of the same suit also gives points.
If two people have the same number of cards o the same suit, the person who manages to get cards not just of a suit, but also of the same âthemeâ will win a tie.
It also seems to be reasonable to assume that each card has an individual point value, so the higher valued cards will with a tie also win out over lower valued cards.
Additionally, the dialogues in Inquisition imply heavily, that the suits also have different values â however, we have no idea how those values go. My personal hunch would be Serpents < Knights < Angels < Songs, just based on mythology, but it is just a hunch.
We also know, that there have to be some sort of combinations like in Hanafuda, where certain combinations of three or more cards have also their own values.
So, generally I will assume that the following combinations will give you points:
Five cards of the same suit will have the highest value.
Followed by four cards of the same suit.
Followed by a triplet and a pair.
Followed by just a triplet.
Again: you will get more points, if they are from the same theme.
Also, I am going to assume that if you collect:
That is going to be also worth some sort of points. However, I am not fully sure whether those are worth more than five of the same suit. Mathematically they should be (it is a lot harder to get four specific cards out of 60 than any five out of twelve from the same set of 60), but we also know that not always to gambling rules follow math.
However, we also know that there are special combinations (again, like Hanafuda) that have specific point values). The one we know is this hand from Isabela:
âI have three angels: fortitude, truth, and charity, and the knight of dawn. I win!â
So, I am going to call this combination âThe Brave Knight at Dawnâ, because those kinds of combinations usually are going to have some sort of name. I am also going to assume that it needs the knight of dawn and the angel of fortitude, but will do with any other two positive emotion angels.
I am also going to assume one other thing: I am thinking that these combinations might actually differ depending on where in Thedas you are. Because in games where there are more storytelling heavy combinations, this is a thing that happens a lot in real life: There are combinations that makes sense in a very specific context, but not in others. And if you really wanna have fun, given that in most DA games the characters come from different backgrounds, you totally could write a story of a fun game of Wicked Grace, that ends up being a big ass argument about which combinations are legal and which are not. I would find that hilarious!
Some ideas about combinations:
The Coronation: The Knight of Roses, the Song of Ascension, and the Angels of Day and of Hearts
The Last Betrayal: The Serpent-Entwined Dagger, the Serpent of Judgement, the Angel of Treachery and the Song of Twilight
The First Day of Spring: Angels of Day and Spring, Songs of Lilies and Hopes
Execution of the Innocent: Serpent of Judgement, Angel of Death, Angel-Drawn Bow, and Song of Dispair
The Age of Dragons: The Serpent of the Forgotten, the Song of Fires, the Angel of Pride, and the Knight of Rage
I hope you get what I am trying to get at. As I said, technically we just know that some sort of those combinations exist. And given we only know one of them that exists in canon, we can pretty much come up with whatever. :P
But yeah, I am going to assume these are generally speaking the rules of how this game is played.
And I am also going to assume that there are at least five other games played with the same sort of deck. I might at some point think about those as well â but not today. For today, I will just leave it at this, and hope I helped someone to clear this out for some sort of fanfic.
You will excuse me? I definitely have to write a fic about how Spite learns to play this game xD
Thank you again @carabas, because without your write up, I could not have managed this. Also thanks to Salem, Benji, and Kay (who are all not on tumblr for some reason), who spent the last week listening to me ramble about this for about six hours total, and helped clearing out the finer details.