Roman, setting down a card: Ace of spades!
Virgil, pulling an uno card: +4!
Patton, pulling out a Pokemon card: Pikachu, I choose you!
Janus: W-what are we playing?
Logan, reading in the corner: They call it “Chaos Cards”, you can bet with monopoly money. You’ll get used to it.
…so how do you play?
@awkwardandanxiousfander said it was like DnD, which i wholeheartedly approve of, despite the fact that i have never actually played DnD.
what i was picturing when i wrote this, was that Chaos Cards was originally Yahtzee. and the light sides had Yahtzee night every week and it was just chill, fun family times.
and then virgil shows up.
and patton is an angel and invites him to Yahtzee night. virgil is like “ok fine” but he is Not Good at yahtzee, and keeps getting unlucky rolls. so after he loses a few games he’s like “screw it” and whips out a deck of uno cards, deals them out and is like “you’re on my turf now”.
patton says “uhm, guys, is this the best idea?” because they’ve already played three games of Yahtzee and it’s kinda late but Roman is true to form and his need to beat virgil replaces all his self-preservation so he’s like “oh please, i can beat him in five minutes”
so patton turns to logan, who he thinks will stop them, in the name of healthy sleep schedules, but virgil already slid him a jar of crofter’s so logan’s like….”you may proceed”
and then five minutes turns into fifteen minutes, and one round turns into four, and it’s suddenly two a.m. so patton puts his foot down before virgil can slide logan another jar of jam.
and that’s that right?
no.
next week, roman thinks he’s smart and brings some playing cards and he does have a very dramatic reveal when virgil’s about to win uno because it’s him and why not.
and virgil isn’t going to back down, and i’m sure janus knew a little bit about poker because being evil, gay, and good at gambling is a top notch aesthetic, and there’s two seasons of kakegurui to prove me right. so he probably picked up a little from poker nights with the darks.
and patton still wants to play yahtzee, but he’s just happy that roman and virgil are bonding.
roman chucked logan a book about whatever logan’s been rambling about for the past week. whales. i’m going with whales because they’re neat and i think logan would like them, so logan’s just vibing.
roman and virgil are playing poker while patton goes upstairs to his room to grab something. they’re in the middle of their second game when patton sprints down the stairs, slams a box of old pokemon cards on the table, picks a random one, and just grins.
two months later, they have a whole damn system on how to play, what uno cards will beat pokemon cards and what hands of poker will win a game of uno.
and then patton gets the bright idea of bringing down a monopoly board.
and logan, who’s generally sitting in the corner munching on jam and reading/working on his laptop, closes his book, stands up, and smirks.
patton and roman are confused and virgil’s nervous because holy shit the last person he saw make that face was janus and logan looked scary.
logan says nothing, he just sits down at the table and starts dealing money.
six hours and three games later, patton, roman, and virgil are slightly traumatized, and logan’s sitting pretty.
so the next yahtzee night comes around, (it’s still called yahtzee night, even though they only use the dice to make a decision on close calls and the paper to write down new rules), and roman’s got a great hand. he grabs the monopoly money and proudly bets two hundred dollars on himself in monopoly cash.
virgil says bring it on and raises him by fifty (i have no idea how poker works but all of the games are now pretty warped and unrecognizable so just roll with it).
patton goes all in. no one knows what this means but somehow he wins all of virgil’s money.
logan’s just chilling in the same way that a volcano that hasn’t erupted in a while, yet could still erupt whenever it feels like it, chills.
roman is okay only because he makes up new rules whenever he’s about to lose. virgil calls him on it the first few times, but then starts to view it as an extra challenge after roman somehow brings a cribbage board into the game.
i am now remembering that this was supposed to be an instruction manual.
i am now remembering that i don’t know how to play cards or pokemon, and that is why i didn’t write an instruction manual.
I don’t have any idea how to chip in either, and what I’m about to say is really not the vibe I’m getting from chaos cards, but:
Personally, I don’t know how to play cribbbage, but my brothers and dad do and they play it whenever we go on vacation so I do know that OUR board is three-person but you can get a four-person board (and honestly, would it really matter? They could play with a one person board and work aspects of Sorry into the game) and, most importantly, cribbage is obviously played with playing cards.
There are a few ways to work uno in: either you use it as an addition to the playing cards somehow, or whenever a specific event happens you just jump to playing a game of uno and whoever wins gets to advance a certain amount on the cribbage board. Personally, I like it as an addition to the playing cards but there is the problem of face cards not having a working parallel in the uno deck.
I don’t know how to play Pokémon either, so if somebody knows they’re gonna have to add in but I imagine its a little like magic the gathering which I have about two games (both of which I lost HARD) of experience with? I could look it up but that would take more time and effort than I’m willing to put in here.
I also don’t know how poker works, but it seems to me like we could forgo adding poker for the most part— add sorry instead, it’s much easier to add with a cribbage board. Just say that each time you reach the end you have to go into the next row until you’re in the third, and THEN whoever reaches the end wins. I’m thinking we could use someone reaching the end of one row on the cribbage board as the uno game starter. This game must take a whole day to play, half of which is just debating rules, let’s be honest— and just retain the betting money feature from it.
For adding monopoly I have a few ideas. Realistically, you play the game on the board and use the money to bet, because monopoly itself is long enough without adding an already undoubtably long game. However, my creativity was unsatisfied for this so we could use whoever wins the uno game as an excuse to roll dice (I almost forgot Yahtzee was the original part of this) and advance on the monopoly board instead of the cribbage board. Only problem is we’d probably have no way to work the rules in. Here’s a proposal instead: constantly switching between the monopoly game and the cribbage/sorry/uno game (you can use the money to bet on the cribbage game, like who reaches the end of the row first, if you think you’re going to, and earn more money for monopoly) and whoever wins each, if they are the same person (it’s going to be logan for both, but if you’re playing in real life it might be different) they just win period, but if it’s two different people they face off in Pokémon (however you play that)
There, a rudimentary sketch for how this might work!
Honestly, uno might be easier to add if you just counted uno cards as numbers, and the draw 2s, 4s, wilds, etc as face cards even though I’m fairly sure there aren’t four of each and more types than face cards? Maybe you could say some of them are the same face card.
Anyway— I forgot to mention that even if you didn’t go into the rules, I still loved that but of creative writing!!
This is an absolutely incredible way to smush every game I put in together, and I highkey want to play this now.
