RAFT

A Game of Construction, Cunning, and Calculated Sabotage

RAFT is a competitive card-building game for one or two players — with a fully realized AI opponent available for solo play. Your objective is straightforward and ruthless in equal measure: construct the largest, most valuable raft you can, while ensuring your opponent's does not survive intact.

SETUP

Combine two standard 52-card decks, including both Jokers, into a single shuffled draw pile of 106 cards. Each player draws an opening hand of five cards. Before play begins, each player selects one card from their hand to serve as the founding piece of their raft, placing it face-up before them. This card must be a numbered card — face cards may not anchor a raft.

BUILDING YOUR RAFT

A raft expands outward from its founding piece in any of the four cardinal directions: North, South, East, or West. Orientation is entirely the player's choice. Each new piece placed must connect to an existing raft card by sharing either its number value or its suit. On each turn, a player draws five cards, plays what they can, and discards their entire remaining hand face-up into the Salvage pile at turn's end. Once per turn, before drawing, a player may take the single top card from the Salvage pile into their hand.

SCORING

At game's end, a raft's value is calculated by summing the face values of all its numbered pieces, then applying any applicable multipliers. Face cards — Jacks, Queens, and Kings — are not raft pieces themselves; instead, they are played face-up atop any existing raft card of matching suit, where they amplify that card's value: a Jack doubles its host's value, a King quadruples it, and a Queen sextuples it.

The two Jokers are wild raft pieces, placeable in any position that a legal numbered card could occupy. A Joker does not contribute a base value of its own, but it doubles the value of every directly adjacent piece in all four cardinal directions simultaneously.

SABOTAGE

Rather than enhancing your own raft with a face card, you may instead deploy it as a Saboteur — placing it face-down onto any piece of your opponent's raft that shares the face card's suit. A Saboteur placed upright negates that raft piece's value entirely and blocks all expansion to the North and South from that position. A Saboteur placed sideways carries the same negation but instead blocks all expansion to the East and West. A Joker played onto a Saboteur-occupied cell overrides it entirely, converting that cell into a standard Joker tile regardless of the Saboteur's orientation.

END OF DECK

When the draw pile is exhausted, the Salvage pile is immediately shuffled and becomes the new draw pile. Play continues uninterrupted. When both the draw pile and the Salvage pile are simultaneously empty, the current player completes their turn in full — and the game ends the moment they do.

VICTORY

Tally each player's raft score in full, applying all face card multipliers and Joker adjacency bonuses, while zeroing out any Saboteur-occupied pieces. The player with the highest total wins. In the event of a tie, victory is awarded to the player whose raft contains the longest unbroken consecutive sequence of cards by number — that is, the greatest number of numerically adjacent cards arranged in a continuous line.

Have a lovely time <3