The Sandwich Guy Rulebook

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Components
• Setup
• Gameplay
• Game End
• Tips and Notes

Overview

You are The Sandwich Guy, whose food truck is known far and wide as a premier foodie destination. You're given a non-stop barrage of ingredients, which you must discard three at a time to make sandwiches. The quality of the sandwich you make is based on the suits of the cards you discarded. Depending on the quality, you get anywhere from two to four cards as replacement ingredients. You win once you've gone through the whole deck.

Components

• A standard 52-card deck, no jokers

Setup

Shuffle the deck and place it face down on the table. Draw the top eight cards of the deck to form your hand. Set aside space for a discard pile.

Gameplay

Each turn, you must discard exactly three cards in your hand that can be arranged into a valid sandwich, or you lose the game. A sandwich is valid if one of the three cards is exactly between the other two. That is, the difference between the first and second card is the same as the difference between the second and third card.

Card values go from Ace (1) < 2…10 < Jack (11), Queen (12) and King (13). Cards "loop" around from King to Ace, so assuming that this is your hand (arranged in order to be clearer), the following three sandwiches are all valid:

• A♣ 3♣ 5♣ (difference of 2 each step)

• 8♠, Q♠, 3♣ (difference of 4, with Q-K-A-2-3 looping around)

• 8♥, 8♠, 8♦ (difference of 0)

• 8♥, 10♥, 8♦ is not a valid sandwich; steps must be increasing.

Discard the three chosen cards, taking note of their suits:

• If they are all the same suit, draw the next four cards from the top of the deck to add to your hand (e.g. A♣ 3♣ 5♣).
• If the discarded cards are all the same color but different suits, draw three cards (e.g. 8♠ Q♠ 3♣).
• If the cards are not all the same color, draw two cards (e.g. 8♥ 8♠ 8♦).

You may only hold a maximum of eight cards at any time; if you would draw a ninth card and you already have eight, ignore the last draw - like the fourth replacement card if you discarded A♣ 3♣ 5♣ in the example above.

Making poor quality (i.e, different color) sandwiches reduces your hand size, which will make it harder to form sandwiches in future turns. You can recover from this by discarding same-suit sandwiches, but mind the hand limit. Sequence carefully to avoid getting locked out.

Game End

Any time you are unable to make a valid sandwich with the cards in your hand, you lose.

If you draw the last card of the draw pile, you win the game. Continue creating sandwiches without replacement until you can't anymore. Your score is the number of cards left in your hand; the lower the better. A perfect game will leave you with only one card in hand.

Tips and Notes

• You may freely look through or sort the cards in the discard pile, as it's important to know how many of each suit and number has been discarded.
• Similarly, you may look through the draw deck at any time, as long as you shuffle afterwards.
• Cards in valid sequences are at most six steps away from each other. All sequences with more than six steps like "8, 2, 9" (difference of seven) can be rearranged into a sequence with a difference of six or below (in this case "9, 2, 8", a difference of six). Hooray math!