Episode 207: Kokopelli

Kokopelli is a hand management card game by Stefan Feld and plays 2-4 players.

In the base set (there is an expansion) there are 12 different types of cards and in each game you only play with 10 of those sets. There is a little bit of set up here as you construct each individual player deck from those sets, each set has 3 cards each, so your starting deck has 30 cards.

Players will be drawing cards and playing these cards in their play area, which consist of 4 spaces in front of them (the village) and the 2 spaces of their neighbors ( two to their left and two to their right, for a total of 8 spaces). These cards when played are called ceremonies and give some kind of ongoing ability (like giving points, drawing more cards, giving options to play more cards, breaking rules, all kinds of things).

Players can’t start a ceremony if the card already exists in their play area. Meaning, if their neighbor has that card in their village, but it also happens to be in your play area you can’t play it.

?So what do you do with that card?!?!? Players can hold it for the future, put it and the rest of their hand at the bottom of the draw deck and draw new cards, or extend a neighbors ceremonies by playing that card onto their pile. Normally if a ceremony has 4 cards played on it, it closes, and all cards are discarded.

Players will score points (i.e. scoring chits) throughout the game in many ways but mainly when they close a ceremony.

The game ends when someone runs out of cards or a certain number of ceremonies of each type have been closed.

At that point, you add up the scoring chits and whoever has the most points wins.