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The Game of Biff

The game of Biff is played by Discordians and people of much ilk. It was invented by Spiral Lobster during the ninth Wheel of Fortune, with assistance by Cokaigne and Brad. Presented here are the rules and the metarules needed to play. I have used shorthand to maximize the amount individual Discordians will have to customize it to their own preferences. Metarules are presented in square brackets i.e. [metarule] and are explained later.

The Rules

You will need one deck of cards, sans jokers per 2-3 players. All cards that are not royal (Queen, King, Jack) are considered value cards.

Deal 7. Left of dealer starts. Take turns going clockwise.

Turn

Play one card or Biff.

[You must either play or Biff unless you have no remaining value cards. If all you have are Royalties in play, you may exercise the 'Royal Perjorative' and decline to Biff.]

[You cannot Biff or be Biffed until you have a Royalty on the table - and you are out of the game when the last Royalty you have in play is discarded.]

Play

Either Recruit or Improve.

Recruit: Commander, Army or Royal.

Commander: any value card. Played sideways onto the table. No player may have more than one commander of any given value.

Army: a value card with the same suit as a commander but a higher value played onto excluding royalty that is higher than the value of the commander but the same suit.

Royal: play sideways, like a commander. Multiple royalties of the same value "strengthen the guards" protecting that Royal - suits don’t have to match, obviously, but the royalty type does (Q on Q, J on J).

[Whichever royalty is played first is the highest value royalty, with the title the player chooses e.g. Empress (Q), Prince Regent (J), King (K) - or anything else you can think of. Highest value is 13, then 12, then 11.]

Improve: Train or Morale.

Train: any value card played on top of an Army. Value must be higher than the Army card and suit must match. Once played, the training card becomes an Army card.

Morale: a value card with the same value as a commander but a different suit. Play under the Commander to improve its morale rating (starts at 1, gains 1 for each morale card).

Biff: One or many stacks.

One Stack: Choose one stack of cards (i.e. a Commander with Army cards and optionally Training and Morale cards or a set of Royalties of the same kind). Choose an opposing player to be a target. That player chooses one of their stacks to defend.
Both players can then play boosts (i.e. value cards from their hand that are the same suit as their participating stack). Totals are then calculated for each stack on the basis of the value of the stack plus the value of any boosts.
[The number of boosts allowed equals the morale of the stack.]
[Royal cards cannot be boosted. Whenever a Royal card either Biffs or is Biffed it is discarded after Biffage.]
If two stacks Biff each other, the lowest value loses a card - in the event of a tie, both lose a card.
[Training/Army cards are lost first, then when no Training/Army cards remain, discard a Morale card. If there are no Morale cards to discard at that point, the Commander is discarded at which point the stack ceases to exist.]

Many Stacks: stacks from any number of players may co-operate in Biffing provided they have the same suit. Combine their total value to see if the stack being attacked is discarded, but apply the value of the stack being attacked separately to each attacking stack to see if they are discarded.

End of Turn

All players draw up to seven cards. Ignore drawing cards when there are no cards left to draw.

Winners are people who are not Biffed out of the game. Surenders and joint wins are allowable.

All rules are subject to metarule modification.

The Metarules

Biff is supposed to be a Storytelling game as well as a table top battle game. It is up to the players to decide on the paradigm of the game - fantasy, science fiction, politics, cartoon violence - any conflict you care to imagine. According to the paradigm, stacks might represent armies, monsters, ninjas, turtles, sheep - anything, really.

A metarule is a rule agreed by the other players that modifies, fills in or otherwise supplements the rules, either in the way the game is played or what the components of the game mean.

Players should always agree to a metarule that is Dramatically Appropriate.

'Dramatically Appropriate' is defined by the players’ mutual agreement as and when it is required.

J’s and P’s, please try and humour each other - T’s and F’s too. Bugger it - just tolerate each other, alright? It’s a game - it’s supposed to be fun!

And now, some example metarules:

[Heroic Sacrifice. A commander with morale cards (Morale of 2 or more) can defend with value of zero - that is, can sacrifice itself in defense.]

[Diamondasaurus! Stacks 6 through 10 (those which have a Commander of value 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10) are not armies but… something else.]

[Suicide Squads. Teams of guards (single Royalty cards can Biff as a "sneak attack".]

[Domestic Pressure. This is a standard metarule - it is given in the main rules. But of course, it’s open to change. The normal state of affairs is you must Biff, but in variants you might not have to Biff under certain circumstances, i.e. there might be no Domestic Pressure if you have the highest value Army in play.]

[The Lesser Metarule. Metarules can have many names.]

[The Greater Metarule. Metarules can have many names.]

[The Political Metaule. All metarules are rules.]

[The Metarule Hypothesis. We cannot prove a difference between rules and metarules.]

[The Religious Metarule. Rules are better than metarules.]

[The Mystical Metarule. Metarules are better than rules.]

[The Discordian Metarule. There is no difference between the Religious and the Mystical metarule - or the Metarule Hypothesis for that matter.]

[The Discordian Metarule. There is a difference between metarules.]

[The Discordian Metarule. Any questions?]

[The Erisian Metarule. Names have many faces.]

So there you go. There should not quite be enough information here to play the game, forcing you to have to guess, improvise and co-operate with other players to create your own rules.

If you want to ask me about how we played the game, you are more than welcome, but the more variants of this game we come up with between us the more Discordian it could become.

I look forward to playing with your metarules sometime!

Spiral Lobster