Underbranch

Underbranch is an abstract set building game of 64 minicards.

In many ways, the game plays like classic Patience-type card arrangement solitaires, but instead of simply building columns in numerical order, you're building various types of sets like in Poker and Blackjack, and even branch out to exotic sets like Fibonacci numbers, color wheel, and so on.

Although the game was designed mainly for solo play, competitive and cooperative variants for two players are included in the rulebook.

Game Overview

The multi-use cards in the game have two halves: number half (numbers 1-10 in six suits) and set objective half (Flush, Straight, Even numbers, etc.).

The numbers are played on top of set objectives to fulfill them, and the sets form “trees” where subsequent sets must fulfill the combined requirements of earlier objectives.

On your turn, you have four options:

1. Play a number card from a queue
2. Play a number card from the deck
3. Play an objective card from the deck
4. Draw 3 objective cards: play one, discard one, return one

Game ends when you cannot do any action, or do not want to do any action, or you have 11 cards in the discard pile.

At game end, the sets that have been built between objectives are scored based on the number of cards in the set and the set’s level in the "tree".

Questions & Answers

What other games are similar to this game?

I'm not aware of a game that has this exact combination of game elements (e.g. variety of sets that are combined into bigger sets with stricter limitations), but some games that come to mind are The Blood of an Englishman (how cards are moved and collected, and how sets are closed), Point Salad (different types of scoring conditions for sets), Ohanami (cards played in columns in ascending or descending order), and of course standard 52-card deck solo games like Pyramid Solitaire and Calculation Solitaire.

Why minicards instead of normal sized cards?

Minicards are a bit of a tradition in solitaire card games because they take less table space and there's no need to see opponents cards across the table.

What's the deal with the pseudo-runes and the name Underbranch?

The name and look of the game came from a coincidental observation that the first five letters of the Futhark runic alphabet (long-branch and short-twig) resemble the word "under" in Latin alphabet. The name alludes to the underlying theme-mechanism combo of understanding how the different card sets either narrow down and limit each other, or allow each other to coexist despite appearing contradictory.