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Paperboy Card Game

Paperboy was created in 1984 for the Atari System 2 upright arcade system. In this game you play as a paperboy delivering papers to subscribers, not delivering to non-subscribers, and avoiding obstacles. The game is won by perfectly delivering your papers to your subscribers throughout the 7 levels (Monday to Sunday).

For the purposes of our card game we have 6 different types of cards. There are newspaper cards, coloured houses, grey houses, cars, kids on skateboards, and kids on trikes. Each card has different rules:

Newspaper Cards: These are your main cards. They are used to collect points by combining them with Coloured House cards, or lose points when combined with Grey Houses.

Coloured Houses: these are subscriber`s houses. They need paper delivered to them either in the player`s hand or placed into the pile for the other player to compete for. When a coloured house is placed down, any other player can score the point. To score, the newspaper they have must be delivered quickly. Once the paper has been delivered they keep the combination to keep track of their score.

Grey Houses: these are non-subscribers. These houses do not get paper delivered to them.  If a paper is delivered that player keeps that combination as a -1 to their score and there is one less newspaper in the deck.

Trikers: these kids constantly get in the players way. These cause the next player to lose their turn.

Skateboarders: these troublemakers steal all of the current newspapers the next player is holding. These newspapers are placed at the top of the discard pile and the player must draw the same number of cards they lost before they play a card.

Cars: these combine the troubles caused by trikers and skateboarders. The next player loses all of their newspapers and their turn is skipped. They do NOT draw any number of lost cards from the deck.

Play continues until there are no newspapers left to deliver and the player with the highest delivery rate wins.

There were a few issues creating this game. First of all, it is difficult to take an established idea, a game that already exists, and create a brand new type of game from it. One of the biggest issues was creating a reason to play coloured houses. I believe this was fixed with the delivery competitions, though I`m still not sure if players will want to play coloured houses unless it is the only thing in their hand.

We also found that there would be no point to have coloured houses if the player could not combine them in their own hand. If the player was expected to place them to continue play without any possible reward for themselves they would quickly realize that they were just giving points to other players.  

The grey houses were another difficulty. These cards would make more sense in a game built more like ‘War’. For example players would have to react more quickly to the image of the house to gain the point; they may not notice it is a grey house until it’s too late. This is mostly fixed by the ‘War’-like idea of delivery competitions. This makes players react more quickly to the image of the house and more likely to place a newspaper on the wrong type of house.

The rest of the cards are simple cards to annoy the player after you, causing players to lose a turn or drop all of their newspapers.

Since the goal is not to be the first to get rid of all of your cards I think this will make an interesting game. I hope everyone enjoys our rendition of Paperboy!