Dionysia

Dionysia is a microgame from Buttonshy Games. So you know what to expect. A game with exactly 18 cards which comes in a wallet that fits comfortably in your shirt pocket. 

Dionysia is a two player game in which you draft cards to make a play. Cards represent scenes. Your play has three acts, and each act must have three scenes. You take turns drafting a card from a market of three face up cards. The moment you take a card, you must decide which act to add it to. When you take the second card for an act, you must stack it above or below the first card, slightly offset so that the icons of every card are visible. This below is what your work-in-progress looks like. For the first two acts where I still had only one card, I didn't need to decide where to position them yet. I placed them this way because I wanted to remind myself this was one potential configuration I wanted to use.  

The top section of a card shows an ability and a scoring criteria. The bottom section shows two icons. When you complete your play, the icons will form a 6x3 grid. The scoring criteria of a card indicates a sequence of icons you need to have in your grid in order to score points. This sequence can go from left to right, or top to bottom. If the sequence occurs multiple times, you score every occurrence. 

The abilities of the cards let you do various things, like rearranging your cards. Often they also help you score points. Of the three cards you have in one act (i.e. one column), only the ability and the scoring criteria of the top card will take effect, because those of the other cards are covered up. When you add cards to your play, you have to decide which card to use as your top card, and which abilities and scoring criteria you have to forgo. Where you position your card affects how the icons appear on your grid eventually, which you must also consider because of the scoring criteria. 

This is what a completed play looks like. If you look at the three scoring criteria, you can see that sword-skull-skull appears twice, cup-skull-skull appears once, and skull-cup-skull appears twice. 

Dionysia is a game of drafting and tableau building. There are difficult choices to make when you build your own play. You need to choose the scoring criteria to use and the card abilities to use, while at the same time you need to build your grid of icons to match the criteria you have selected. You need to consider multiple requirements at the same time. And then there's also your opponent to worry about. Sometimes you may want to take a card for the sake of denying him.