All eurogames ever made have a tipping point where you go from building up your power to start cashing in victory points. For example Splendor where you can buy cheap cards to get going but sooner or later you need to pivot to buying good cards that give you points.
I wish there was a game for traditional playing cards with that same property. There are some games that have two phases; first you play to grab cards that are gonna help you in the second phase. But here I want those decisions throughout the game: do I grab that card that helps me get better at grabbing cards, or do I grab that card that gives me more points at the end?
So I’m thinking a fishing game like Casino as the base.
54 card deck.
Deal four cards to the players and four face up “in the lake”.
You can do one of three things:
To catch a card, reveal one or more non-face cards from your hand—if more, it has to be a suited straight, like the four-five-six of spades. Again, you can’t catch with royals. The caught card needs to be of the same suit and strictly lower than the sum of the cards you played. So four-five-six of spades can catch any spade since 4+5+6 = fifteen and the highest card is king which is 13. Aces are always one in this game. Put the caught cards in your catch pile.
To recruit a card, same thing except the recruited card doesn’t have to be same suit, it can be any suit, but it can’t be a face card (JQK), and all the cards go into your hand instead. Yeah, you just get back the recruiting cards straight up. Again, when you use multiple cards to recruit, they do need to be suited and sequential just as with catching.
To dump cards, place one or more cards from your hand face up into the lake. For example face cards since you can’t use them for anything else. “Why would you–” if you can’t catch or recruit, this is your only option. You can only pass if you don’t have any cards in hand at all.
When everyone has had four turns, deal out four new cards but don’t replenish the lake. Keep playing like this until the deck’s empty. Then after those four last turns, all cards in hand are worthless, all caught face cards are worth three points each and all other caught cards are worth one each.
So recruited cards go back to your hand along with the cards that recruited them. Caught cards go to your catch pile along with the cards that caught them. And face cards can’t be recruited and can’t catch or recruit (royals are lazy in this game).