Parade

Based on the game by Naoki Homma

A parade of musicians is coming, and they need a place to practice. Play your cards right to get as few as possible and keep things quiet.

Setup

Use 6 suits: Clubs♣, Spades♠, Hearts♥, Diamonds♦, Caps■, and Switches＋. From each suit, take ranks 0–9 and the X (treat X as 10). That’s 11 cards per suit, 66 cards total.

Shuffle all 66 cards. Deal 5 cards to each player as their hand. Place 6 cards face-up in a line, from left to right, in the center of the table. This is the starting parade. Make sure everyone knows the direction of the parade. New cards are added to the parade on whichever end is the dealer’s right.

The remaining cards form the draw pile.

Gameplay

Choose a player to go first however you would like. On your turn:

1. Play one card from your hand to the end (newest position) of the parade line.

2. Potentially collect cards from the line:

• Starting from the newest end of the parade, count down the rank of the card you just played (not counting the card you just added). These cards cannot be collected this turn.
• All cards beyond those safe cards (older cards in the line) are candidates. From those candidates, you must collect every card that:
  • has the same suit as the card you played.
  • has a rank equal to or lower than the card you played.

Place all collected cards face-up in front of you, sorted by suit.

3. Draw one card from the draw pile (if any remain).

Special case: If you play a 0, its value is 0, so zero cards are safe — the entire line (except the 0 you just played) is exposed, but you only collect cards with rank 0 or cards of the same suit.

End of game

The game ends when either the draw pile runs out or any one player has collected cards from all 6 suits. When this happens, finish the current round so everyone has had equal turns. Then each player chooses 2 cards from their hand and adds them to their collection.

Scoring

For each suit, check who has the most cards of that suit. Ties count — all tied players qualify. If you have the majority in a suit, each of your cards in that suit counts as only 1 point (regardless of its rank). If you don’t have the majority, each card counts as its full face value.

Add up points across all 6 suits. The lowest score wins.

Strategy note

High cards give you fewer candidates to collect, but you are more likely to collect the candidates that are available. Playing a low card may mean you collect many cards that match its suit. The majority-scoring rule means that sometimes collecting lots of one suit is better than having a few scattered cards in it.

Winning

Lowest score wins.