At this particular point during vacation, the evening group was made up of me, Rachel, Biz, Brian and my mom. We’d just finished playing a “real” game when Brian placed the full deck of cards face down and asked my mom to guess the top card. “What are we playing?” she asked. “Just guess.”

What happened next is we made up a new and very fun card game called “Tens,” named for the card my mom did not guess correctly: the ten of spades. If you’d like to play yourself, here are the Official Rules:

1. First player tries to guess the top card. As there’s only a one-in-fifty-two chance of doing this, you probably won’t guess it.
2. Play moves to the left, where the next player makes up the next rule.
3. Repeat step 2 until all the cards are gone.

Due to the random and fast-and-free nature of the game, I couldn’t begin to tell you how it was actually played. What I do remember is that everyone genuinely tried to make up a real rule on their turn and — and this is the truly fascinating part — how quickly made up rules became rules. When someone tried to make a play that was incongruous with the general vibe of the game — or contradicted an earlier yet completely-made-up rule, we’d all shout, “You can’t do that!”

After Tens, we then made up a second game. It followed the exact same rules as ten and, therefore, was a completely different game. We called this one “I Want Them” because part of the game was a very Go Fish-like, in that you could ask someone if their hand contained a certain face value. If it did, you would then say, “I want them,” and that player would give you those cards. It was around this point I wondered if it would be possible to create and market a game framework that would help people to make up their own party games the way we seemed to do so effortlessly.

Still going strong, we then moved onto game number three. This one fell to me to kick off. I decided to grab three of the dice from Things, which we’d played earlier. In Things, the dice do not have numbers, but colors. Three sides are green, two sides are yellow, and one side is red.

After pondering it for all of ten seconds, I decided that the player got to roll their choice of one, two, or three dice. The color of each rolled die helped determine what cards to play. Now, I won’t go into all the details here because — let’s face it — reading detailed rules isn’t fun for anyone. But if I wanted to go into great detail about this game, I actually could.

Why? Because unlike Tens and I Want Them, Tropple (a working title) quickly got real. The rules became both simple and rigid and by the end we all were thinking it: this could be a real game. But all games like this require lots of play-testing. You have to find out if the play is even and not lopsided, if it lasts the right amount of time, if it’s fun.

So early the next morning, I popped open my laptop and began coding the game as software. I figured it would be fun to run thousands of games in seconds and examine the results. I could then tweak things: number of players, number of dice, kinds of dice, how many cards to begin with, and so on.

It took a couple days, working on it here and there, mostly when everyone else was asleep, but I got it working. At which point, vacation came to an end and so did my interest in the card game.

But we’ll be back in 2021 and unlike every other game we’ve made up, I’ve got these rules nailed. The software won’t forget.