Joker Jailbreak

I first heard about Joker Jailbreak when I saw Mark playing it on his Riffle, Shuffle & Roll youtube channel.  The game was created by Ramon Huiskamp (roofkat) about 6-7 years ago.  The home page on itch.io is here.

This is a fun little solitaire game with a standard deck of cards.  To setup, remove one joker and put the other joker in the middle of the table.  Now build the jail around the joker by putting stacks of six face down cards above, below, to the left and right around the center.  These are the "walls" of the jail.  Add corner stacks of two face down cards, then add a face-up card to all 8 of those stacks surrounding the joker.  The remaining cards are set aside face down as the remainder pile.  This setup uses 4x7 + 4x3 = 40 cards, so there should be 12 cards left in the remainder pile.

The goal is to break through one of the walls so the joker can escape.  Clearing the cards from a corner is not an escape.

On each turn, you take some combination of face-up red cards that match the total of a combination of face-up black cards.  J,Q,K count as 11, 12 and 13 points.  So, red 6+4 could take out a black 10, or red K+2 (13+2) can take out a black 8 and 7 (also 15).  Discard those cards and flip the top cards on any exposed piles.

If you can't find a move, you can take one of the remainder cards and place it face-up over the joker in the middle.  You can then use that face-up card in combos if needed.  The joker cannot escape if there are any cards left on top of it.  Finally, there is limit of three cards on top of the joker, like the old prisoner ball-and-chain.  

You lose if you cannot make another move.

I was able to start off by beating this game five times in a row.  It's a relaxing little exercise.  Anne came in on the last few games and we worked together to beat it.  Yes, you can always turn a solo game into a cooperative challenge with a friend.  It felt too easy when you can just remove matching cards, like a red 6 for a black 6.  I started calling those "trivial moves", and we were able to win again without using them.  Even red 6 + 8 against black 6 + 8 felt trivial.  Double trivial, in fact.  Then I pondered it a bit.  Did I not like the feel of those moves because they were so obvious, or because you're not doing any math there?

When I went to write this up, I saw that the official rules said to put only three cards in each corner, where I played with four, leaving only 8 cards in the remainder.  The rules say you can adjust the difficulty by adding or removing cards from the corners, so I guess I played it one notch easier than usual.

There is some debate about whether to start with the piles fanned out, like in my first image.  But that got disorderly as we picked cards, and never felt like a wall to me.  We ended up playing with squared-off stacks.  It would be nice to know how many bricks were left in each wall, and I suppose we could count them manually, but I think the compact layout is just more manageable.

This was fun to dive into.  And discovering itch.io was a big eye-opener.  It was goof to see a big community of gamers just making the games they want to make, having fun with text and art and zines, tossing so many ideas around, with developer jams and other events along the way.