VOLATRICK

About

Volatrick is a team trick-taking game, like Spades or Hearts, except the cards don’t have fixed ranks. Each card is something with a price (natural gas, soybeans, a memecoin, a stock, uranium), and a seeded market moves those prices while you play. How strong a card is depends on the rules the teams drafted for the round, and those rules read the market: expensive cards, cheap ones, volatile ones, the ones on a run.

• Draft the rules: before every round each team votes in one rule from a hand of options, and the round is played under both teams’ picks. 42 rules in all: what makes a card strong, what scores, what poisons your pile, which tricks count extra.
• The market ticks mid-round: every few tricks (three early in a game, down to one by the end), prices, change and volatility move, and every card’s power is re-ranked. The hand you planned around shifts under you.
• Breakouts: once the market has ticked, a card whose price swings hard enough breaks out. It beats every normal card, even off-suit, and can be played against any lead.
• Four decks: Commodities (the classic), Crypto (wild swings), the S&P 100 (the biggest) and Elements (small and tight).
• Action cards: between rounds, profits and leverage buy cards like Insider Trading, Circuit Breaker, Short Sell and Hostile Takeover.
• Seeded: the same seed makes the same market, so a game can be replayed or shared as a challenge.
• A scoring receipt: each round’s take is added up line by line and cascades in, with a bonus for cornering a suit.
• Bots fill any empty seat (the intermediate ones each play to a personality), and step in when a player’s turn timer runs out.

A game, screen by screen

Four decks

On a phone

The same game, joined from a phone with the room code: the table on top, your hand stacked below.

How to play

A first game opens with four quick cards on how a trick works. The full rules, with every rule and action card, are one tap away in the lobby.