Skull Queen

Skull Queen is a trick-taking card game where players are trying to get their pirates to the end of the plank… but not in the sea.

As with most trick-takers, the default rule is that if a player leads a certain suit, all others must follow suit if they can(eg you play a green card; I must play a green card too if I have one). If you can’t follow, you can discard a card of any suit. The catch here is that the winner of a trick – who played the highest number of the led suit – pushes their pirate one step up the plank, and the loser (lowest card) pushes their pirate down. So during play, pirates will be shuffling up and down the planks of each player, with everyone intent on keeping them out of the water, and ideally at the highest-scoring end of the plank (8 points per pirate) as opposed to the lowest (1pt per pirate).

You get to mitigate events however – or at least prepare for them – by arranging your pirates where you want them at the start of each round. If you see you have a lot of high red cards, for example, you might place your red pirate low on the plank, anticipating that it’ll move upwards during play. If you have just one middling green card, you might be confident of placing your green pirate high on the plank, trusting you won’t win a trick with the card (and hopefully avoid losing as well).

There are further catches to consider. Firstly, there’s a wild 13 and a wild zero that are always considered on-suit: basically a guaranteed win or loss. Secondly, any trick with a 5 in it pushes the loser’s pirate down twice, and any trick with an 8 in it pushes the winner up twice: both of these can be disastrous at the wrong moment!

Also if more than one discarded cards not matching the led suit are played, they effectively form a second trick, with the winner and loser assigned the same pirate movement as the led suit. If only one card of a colour was played, it stays on the table until the any subsequent trick is resolved with the same-coloured card. At the end of each round, players score their pirates, and after x number of rounds (usually, one round per player) the player with the most points wins. (note: you can optionally flip your plank to its other side, where the number sequence is reversed. This can be very helpful with a hand of low numbers!)