Deadline Saloon

In a godforsaken town in the wild west a new saloon has opened. Citizents are scrambling for the admission in hopes of free booze. With wise and smart decisions you need to help them to achieve their goals and at the same time impede on other players as much as you can. Each citizen has unique capabilities supporting their admission but your decisions and tactics can make them succeed in this entertaining card game.

Setup: At the beginning sort all the cards by color. Each players chooses a certain color. The optional characters (negative numbers) can be used or can be excluded from the deck at your will. For the first few playthroughs, until you get familiar with the characters and game mechanics, it’s best to play without the optional characters. Each player shuffles all of their cards, deal out 4 cards for their hands and placing the rest face down in front of them. Place the Entrance card on the table and in clockwise order the players begin to put their cards one-by-one next to the Entrance card. Gameplay: (each step is mandatory)

Place a card
Execute the action for character of the placed card
Execute starred characters’ actions in the queue from back to front. In every turn each character executes their action once, hence if a starred card is placed during the turn then its action won’t be executed again.
Draw a card if you have less than 4 cards in hand.
If there are at least 5 cards in the queue then the first 2 cards enters the Saloon. At the end of the game (even if Thief is in the queue) when all of the cards are played out the first card of the last queue enters the Saloon and the others go to the Cemetery. Cards are collected facing down.
If the color of the last card of the queue doesn’t match the color of one of the cards which enters the Saloon then the last card walks sadly to the Cemetery. Optional rule: The player whose character walked to the cemetery is allowed (but not compulsorily) to draw one card from one of their opponent’s hand if this opponent holds at least 4 cards in their hand. The player puts the drawn card facing up in front of the opponent. The opponent must play out this drawn card in their next turn. Card can not be drawn from opponent who already has a drawn card in front of them.

Ending: Game ends when all of the cards are played out. The player who has the most characters in the Saloon wins. If several players end up with a tie then the player whose characters in the saloon have the lowest overall values wins.