Ambition (card game)
Ambition is a trick-taking game invented by Mike Church, a student at Carleton College. Usually played with four players, it can be adapted to fit as few as three or as many as eight. Since its inception in September 2003, Ambition has steadily grown in popularity, notably among college students in the United States.
Ambition is a point-trick game where points are desirable, but the player scoring the most points in a round is penalized, earning no points to his or her total and a strike. Players failing to achieve a certain quota (11 points, in a four-player game) also strike, but retain their points. When a player "strikes out", or receives three strikes, the game ends and that player is disqualified from winning, regardless of score. The winner is the highest-scoring of the remaining players.
Ambition differs from most trick-taking games in that it makes an objective of scoring second in each round.
There is no trump suit and cards follow the standard ranking of trick games (Ace high, 2 low) with one exception: Deuces become high in the presence of a face card or Ace of the same suit in the trick.
In March 2004, Ambition was published in the Japanese puzzle magazine Nikoli.
Ambition++, an advanced variant of Ambition, further reduces the role of luck by allowing players to draft their hands.
The hand-draft occurs in several rounds. In each round, each player is dealt a pool of cards to choose from. Each player selects a certain number of cards from that pool and adds them to his or her hand. The other cards are set aside or shuffled back into the deck, and the process repeats until all the cards have been dealt.
A hand-draft schedule indicates the specific numbers of cards which are dealt and selected. The conventional hand-draft schedule for Ambition++ uses seven rounds of drafting.
Basics of Ambition
Hand-draft variant
External link