CWARDS: The Ultimate Card & Word Game

CWARDS is a card game and a word game mixed into one, combining the pastime of the former with the challenge of the latter. It is made up of 104 cards, divided into four series of the 26-letter alphabet so that every letter appears four times, once in each suit.

Each player is dealt 10 cards, and a turn is as in many rummy games: draw, play, and discard. An initial play must include a word and either a run or set of letters; after that players can use their to to play more runs, sets and words, and/or add to existing ones. A draw can only be done from the discard pile if the card can be used in a meld, and all the discards above it in the pile are added to the hand. Sets and runs score the sum of the values of their letters, as do words, but words also have bonuses: letters beyond 4 are doubled; a word of one color is double, while a word of one suit is trebled.

When a player empties their hand, all other players subtract the value of the cards in their hand from their score. All cards on the table stay there, while all the others (in hands, deck, and discard pile) are shuffled together for another hand, in which players must still do a new opening play before playing to cards on the table. After there are no cards left in the deck, and a player empties their hand, then the game ends with the highest score winning.