(2026-01-05) Discovered a game potentially even better than Bulls and Cows
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Picture this game.

* You start with 20 HP, which is your maximum health, and your mission is to
clear a 44-card dungeon (deck) room by room, without your health reaching 
zero. The deck is the standard 52-card deck minus all red face cards and red 
aces (and any jokers). You'll also need a way to keep track of your health.
* Every room is dealt from the top of the deck and consists of four cards.
You have two choices: engage with the room or run away, but you cannot run 
away twice in a row or if you already engaged with the room.
* If you choose to run, all room cards are shuffled and put to the bottom of
the deck, and an entirely new room is dealt.
* If you choose to engage, you have to interact with three out of the four
room cards, and the remaining card stays for the next room. You can choose 
the cards to interact with in any order you want.
* In the room, you may encounter a monster (any clubs or spades from 2 to A),
a weapon (diamonds from 2 to 10) or a potion (hearts from 2 to 10). The item 
level is 2 to 10 for number cards, 11 for J, 12 for Q, 13 for K and 14 for A.
* If interacting with a potion card, you "drink" it and increase your HP by
its value, but the max health still remains 20. Then you discard the potion 
card.
* In a single room, only one potion card may be used. If you have to interact
with another one, it must just be discarded.
* If interacting with a weapon card, you "equip" it, discarding any previous
weapon you had. Your weapon also has durability value, meaning the maximum 
level of monsters you may use it on. For any newly equipped weapon, the 
durability is 14.
* If interacting with a monster card, you "fight" it and discard it. You may
choose to fight it barehanded or with your weapon.
* If fighting barehanded OR your weapon's durability is lower than the
monster level, you take full damage and just subtract the monster level from 
your HP.
* If fighting with your weapon AND its durability is higher than or equal to
the monster level, you take the damage equal to (monster level - weapon 
level), taking no damage if the weapon level is higher than the monster 
level, AND then set the durability to (monster level - 1).
* When playing with a physical deck, durability tracking is like this: you
put the monster card on the side of your equipped weapon card so that you 
can see that you're only allowed to fight monsters weaker than you've last 
slain with this weapon. In this case, when a new weapon is equipped, the old 
weapon card is discarded along with all slain monsters.
* Once all three out of four items in the room have been interacted with,
three new cards are dealt from the deck and you repeat the process in a new 
room.

What I've just described (omitting the endgame scoring system, which is not
really necessary here) is the entire ruleset ([1]) of a roguelike solo card 
game called Scoundrel, designed by Zach Gage and Kurt Bieg in 2011. What's 
remarkable is that, for such a simple ruleset, there really is a lot going 
on. The gameplay is dynamic and quite challenging, sometimes making you 
think a lot about your choices. For example, if you see a 10-level weapon in 
the room but no 11 to 14-level monsters, should you really pick it up? Will 
you be able to save it for when it's really needed? From the mind-training 
perspective, I think this game can hardly get boring anytime soon.

From the coding perspective, this game was a breeze to implement in
CircuitPython for my T-DeckARD project ([2]) but I already have started 
porting it to pure C to polish the algorithmic part. With how 
straightforward the ruleset is, Scoundrel has plenty of portability 
potential, almost as much as Bulls and Cows have. I have some doubts about 
whether it can fit onto calcs like HP 12C (considering how much my Bulls and 
Cows port weighs there), but on a TI-74S it surely can.

So, it's fun to play even without electronics, easy to code if you have some
electronics, eats no resources and can be recreated from memory on almost 
any medium. I think that's the real entertainment gift I was looking for.

Happy new year!

--- Luxferre ---

[1]: http://stfj.net/art/2011/Scoundrel.pdf
[2]:
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/t-deckard/src/branch/master/game/scoundrel.py