Dungeon Daycare

You are daycare workers sharing one classroom. Every kid you place shoves the other kids around. At the end of the day, the kid on top of a square had a good day and graduates. Everyone underneath comes home with you.

Setting up

• Lay out the classroom: a 3 × 3 grid of empty squares.
• Each player takes a starting deck of about 8 kids, shuffles it, and takes 5 control markers in their colour.
• The rest of the kids form the communal deck. This is also the game clock.

A day

Morning

Everyone draws 5 cards from their own deck, shuffling their discard when they run out. If you still can't make 5, top up from the communal deck.

The day itself

Starting with the first player and going clockwise, take turns. On your turn, either:

• Place a kid. Put a card face up on any square, on top of whatever's already there, and put one of your markers on it. Resolve its ability.
• Pass. You can still play on a later turn.

The day ends when everyone passes in a row, or when every hand is empty.

The bell

Resolve each square that has cards on it. The top card belongs to whoever placed it last — that player controls the square.

• The top card graduates: face down into that player's score pile, worth 1 point, out of the game.
• Every card underneath goes into that same player's discard. They own those kids now.
• Empty squares score nothing.

Clear the classroom and take your markers back.

Enrolment

Reveal player count + 2 kids from the communal deck. Starting with the new first player, each player takes exactly one into their discard. Whatever's left is removed from the game. Pass first player clockwise.

Why the game is tense

Almost all of the pressure comes out of the bell rule and nothing else. If it isn't landing at the table, look here first.

• A thin square is the best point in the game — one kid, one graduation, nothing buried.
• A fat square is a point and a mouthful. Cap a four-high stack and you graduate one kid and swallow three.
• So you can defend a square by making it worse. Pile onto your own square until taking it costs more than it's worth.
• And holding your last card is strong against thin squares and a trap against fat ones. Everyone can see which is which, because the stacks are right there.

Ending

The game ends after the day in which the communal deck runs out. Most graduated kids wins.

Writing the kids

The point of the abilities is that your cards have opinions. A kid isn't a tool you aim — it's a monster child you're responsible for, and sometimes it goes off in your face. Aim for interesting, not balanced.

• Displacement — sends kids off this square or away from it. Where they land is printed on the fleeing kid, not chosen by whoever scared them. That's what keeps the board readable.
• Lockdown — adjacent squares can't be placed on, or kids there can't flee.
• Hand interference — force a discard, skip a turn, change turn order.
• Backfires — effects that hurt whoever played the card. These give the game its character. Don't make them all downside; make them situationally terrible.
• Scatter (rare) — push the stack in front of this kid one square, in a direction you choose along the card's facing, leaving this square empty.
• Destruction (rare) — remove a stack from the game, top card included. You lose a graduation to do it.
• Transferring out — honest deck thinning. Culling is a reward here, so don't dress it up as a penalty.

On the table

The Table tab plays the rules above with these rulings, wherever the text left a gap. Change your mind and the engine changes with you; they are all one line each.

• A kid belongs to whoever placed it. The top kid's owner controls the square, even if the kid got there by fleeing. So scaring a kid onto a square can hand that square to its owner.
• A kid fleeing "toward" or "away" on a diagonal moves along the longer axis; on a tie, vertically.
• Kids under the placed card have no "toward" or "away"; they use their printed arrow.
• Fleeing off the edge is a dial: the kid hits the wall and stays, or goes home to its owner's discard.
• Scatter pushes in any direction that stays in the room, or only along the printed arrow's axis if the kid has one.
• A skipped turn is not a pass. The day still ends when everyone passes in a row.
• If the communal deck runs out during the morning draw, that day is the last. If it runs out at enrolment, one more day is played so the picks matter.
• Control markers aren't modelled; with hand size equal to marker count they only count the hand.
• Every scare is decided from a snapshot, so a kid never flees twice from one card.

Dials

• Grid size — 3 × 3 is small for four or more players; everything early gets buried.
• Hand size, currently 5, matching the marker count.
• Starting deck size, enrolment width, and how many of each type sit in the communal deck.

What the first session is for

Test 1 — one day, no decks. Two or three players, 3 × 3, a dozen kids, three or four strongly different types. Play a single day. No graduation, no enrolment, no second round. You're only asking whether the board did something you didn't expect, and whether you had a hard choice on half your turns. Rewrite abilities mid-session — that's the point.

Test 2 — add the stack economy. Same room, now with graduation and buried kids going to your deck, over three or four days. Now you're asking whether decks bloat faster than graduation clears them.

Still open

• Do the abilities make interesting boards, or just noise? Everything else is downstream of this.
• Does denial turn into kingmaking? Scatter and destruction gain the user nothing, so the target is the leader and the winner is whoever's second. Fine at three players. Watch it at five.
• Are the control markers doing any work? With five cards and five markers they're just a count of your hand.
• What happened to the two-sided cards? Either the idea comes back with a job, or it's gone. Don't leave it half-in.
• Variable classrooms are a later problem. Get the plain grid stable first.