Jekyll vs. Hyde

Poor old Doctor Jekyll, tormented by the monster inside him. As if the psychological struggle wasn’t enough, there is now the additional burden of rules, because here comes Jekyll vs. Hyde, the card game where one player is the good doctor, and the other his inner beast. Trapped in a struggle for control of the psyche, we shall trade blows through the medium of trick-takingwhen a card is played, other players must follow suit if they can.

The small board tracks the crumbling resistance of Jekyll: the metal marker begins at ‘his’ end of the track and the Hyde player must drag it protestingly to the other end to win. If the Jekyll player can hold out over three rounds, they’ll win instead.

In round one, players are dealt a hand of cards and must swap a card each before play begins. The cards come in three suits – red/green/purple – numbered 1-7, and one special ‘potion’ suit we’ll come to shortly. As in standard trick-taking, if I lead a green card you must play green if you have it. The highest card wins the trick and a new trick begins, and so on until all the tricks have been claimed. Jekyll’s goal is that both players win an equal number of tricks – keeping things in balance – or as near to it as possible. Hyde wants to either lose or win as many tricks as possible: the difference between the trick hauls is how far the marker moves along the track toward the far end, representing defeat for Jekyll. He’s not interested in harmony, but chaos.

However the game is far from a simple comparison of cards, for two reasons. One is that the comparative values of the three suits to each other is determined by the order they appear in each round: if red is player first and green second, red will be the weakest suit and purple the strongest. This changing order is tracked by tokens on the board. Even if I can’t follow your red card – because I have no red cards left – I can now beat it with a green or a purple. As the cards run out, trick winners come down to the suit as often as the number.

The other reason is the potion cards. These can be played instead of following suit, and trigger the superpower of whatever suit is played in the same trick as the potion: green forces players to swap cards, purple allows the trick winner to steal a previously-claimed trick, and red sweeps all the tokens off the board and allows the suit order to be re-established: potentially critical in allowing players to change the dynamic of the cards, without changing the cards themselves.

After three rounds, the game concludes with either Jekyll surviving or Hyde triumphing.