Friday, November 28th, 2025 - TrickJarrett.com: Be excellent to each other.

Nasty Game Design

11/28/2025 7:15 am

For the entirety of my life, my family has played a card game we call 'Nasty.' It is very similar to Uno, but uses normal decks of cards. Jokers are Wild Draw 5s, and Kings reverse, for example. And, for the entirety of my life, the rules of the game have remained the same with zero modifications. This game is a mainstay of our family gatherings. Even in the era of video games, the youngest kids still clamor to play Nasty.

Well, during this Thanksgiving holiday, we introduced a variant rule to the game. It came about after talking about the game with my oldest brother Shawn. I learned that a part of the family played the game slightly different than I had learned. All my life, the Queen in the deck was simply the lowest point total card but had no function. Where every other face card did something special. Learning that the Cobbs family played it where both the Queen and King reversed the order of play, something I don't recall ever hearing about before. Now, I find it remarkable that it never came up before, perhaps I did hear it but I immediately discarded it as being 'wrong.' I don't think so, but my memory is definitely a sieve, so I want to be sure to allow for that possibility.

Well, hearing it this trip got me thinking what else could the Queen be used for in the game? Being someone who works in games, though I am far from a game designer of the caliber of my colleagues at Wizards and at Riot, I was immediately drawn to finding a way to add more interactivity into Nasty.

My initial proposal to Shawn was for Queens to nullify any "offensive" cards played against you. So, if a card would skip you, you could play a Queen still. Or if someone was going to make you draw extra cards, the Queen would protect you. It was Shawn's idea of it being reflective back to the person playing it. Initially I was against this, as it seemed possibly too powerful for there to be 8 of them in game (we normally play using two decks of cards) but we agreed to test it out and see.

And, last night, we played several hands with the new Queen rules and it was universally loved.

Shawn also came up with calling them Dale Queens or Queen Dales, which is fitting as we can all easily imagine mom cackling with glee if she was able to play a Queen in response to a Joker.

So, after 42 years of my life, it looks like we're going to update the rules for family games of Nasty. As I've been the keeper of the rules document (aka a google doc) I spent this morning cleaning it up and adding the rules for the new variant "Next Level Nasty" which adds the Queens new powers and updates their point total from 2 points to 25 points.

Definitely less impactful than the Queens, but that wasn't the only innovation to the game that came about this weekend. I also proposed another small variant when we played just a 4-player game of Nasty. Rather than tracking the point total for hands and playing to a threshold, we played for Jolly Ranchers. So instead of tracking points hand to hand, we played to 20 Jolly Ranchers. For each round, the first place person got 4 Jolly Ranchers and last place got 1.

Not an earth shattering bit of game design, but I thought it would be a good change for two reasons: First, I didn't want to worry about tracking hand totals, and secondly it avoided any one player totally running away with it or conversely someone having bad luck in multiple rounds and ending up well out of first place. Downshifting scoring is a sort of come-back mechanic to keep it more interesting.

With this way, we did decide you could eat your winnings, but then it wouldn't count towards your total for the game. You know, the important thing. Candy.

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