The Ropes
What NAUTCHES Is
Nautches is a deck of 120 hexagonal playing cards. Like a standard 52-card deck, Nautches is for playing various abstract games.
Each Nautches card is marked with a color, a suit and a sequence represented by a series of nautches on the edges.
There are two colors: red and blue. There are 6 suits: fleurs, stairs, wings, gems, skulls, and eyes.
The six suits.
Standard Placing Rules
Basic gameplay in most games, involves placing cards such that the nautches on the played card align with the nautches on all touching edges.
The first two are valid plays because the nautches match. The third is not valid because the nautches do not match.
What NAUTCHES Isn’t
Nautches is not exactly “a game.” Just like a deck of cards is not a game. Nautches is a deck of cards with which any number of games can be played. More to the point, we hope you will create new games with Nautches.
We were once in the habit of inventing games. Once in our personal past, as children. Once in our collective past, when true boredom was a force to be fought off with whatever might be lying around.
To invent games is not easy. Especially since we’ve lost the habit. So here we provide some rudiments. The makings of games.
We developed Nautches with the idea that playing games should not be primarily about winning, or about a particular objective, and certainly not about learning to follow rules.
We developed Nautches with the idea in mind that playing games should entail creativity, and that half of the fun is in exploring patterns and uncertainty.
Community
What we ultimately want is a community here where people can share and modify one another’s games. Nautches is quite new and it will take some time before that is fully developed out, but here are a few of our most recent contributions:
We hope you’ll bear with us in the meantime, and, more importantly, contribute!
Contribute
The idea of Nautches is to create games. We hope that you’ll share your contributions with the community here!