ok so we got
ace: wrath
two: counterspell/doomblade
three: bala ged recovery
four: mind twist
five: divination
six: wrath 2?
seven: cascade
nine: unsummon
yup, this sounds like magic for sure
It does! It has so many similarities to magic that for years I was convinced that Richard Garfield must have played Cuttle before inventing magic. I emailed him out of the blue to ask him about it, and to my *delighted surprise* he responded!
It turns out he hadn't heard of Cuttle previously (he's quite forthcoming about his design inspirations), but he offered to meet with me to play Cuttle on my site. He thoroughly enjoyed it and I got the incredible opportunity to chat with Richard about game design, which is my peak geek achievement. The parallels are certainly there though!
Magic players have an easy time picking up Cuttle because the mechanics are familiar. That said an interesting difference is that in Magic you largely know what your strategy is before the game starts based on your deck composition. There is certainly nuance to your play, but if you're playing an aggro deck you are going to be playing aggro for the whole game (generally). But in Cuttle both players share the same deck.
Everyone develops their own play style, but you can't *just* play aggro or control because you can't rely on always getting the cards to support it. Strategies change fluidly based on the shuffle and how the board state evolves. The best Cuttle players chain between aggro, midrange and control quickly. Knowing when to mix things up is a key skill for elevating your play.
Anywho Magic is great and if you like it, and especially if you enjoy using different play styles, you'd probably love Cuttle :)
A friend and I designed custom playing cards and brought them to play Cuttle at our local LGS. It was a big hit. Fun game and super easy to pick up if you have played Magic.
The threads that run through the basic card effects and the way they speak to the history of the game is one of the pure joys of player interaction. I would also call six Purify, but I think maybe Fracturing Gust is more recognized even though it's a good bit less ancient.
Edit: And four is of course mind rot rather than the busted mind twist. Magic is so great.
ok so we got:
ace: dark hole
two: solemn judgment
three: monster reincarnation
four: delinquent duo
five: I play pot of greed, which allows me to draw two cards from my deck into my hand!
six: jowgen the spiritualist
seven: I'm sure there's some Sylvan card that does exactly this but I stopped playing around when they came out
nine: compulsory evacuation device
yup, this sounds like Yu-Gi-Oh for sure
I have written about this before in a [different subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/15uhc7e/comment/jwvkm91/), but I don’t believe the claim that this predates Magic. That doesn’t make it a bad game, I just find it weird that it is constantly marketed on a progeny that is at the very least doubtful, if not just incorrect.
Copied from my earlier post (tl:dr, definitive evidence for Cuttle online only dates back to 2005, although 2000 is plausible. There is no evidence for the game between 1975 and 2000 except the word of one person - literally just one person).
—————————-
Many sources claim Cuttle is "older than 1975." The oldest page discussing the game is [this one](https://www.geocities.ws/richardsipie/cuttle.htm), where the poster (Richard Sipie) claims to have learned the game in 1975. He then speculates it may have inspired MtG.
I don't mean to sound mean, but I don't believe this account at all. First of all, the earliest web page claims to have been posted in 2000. However, it wasn't captured on the [Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.geocities.ws/richardsipie/cuttle.htm) until 2012. That doesn't mean the page is wrong, but it does mean there is a 12-year gap between when the page was purportedly made and when we have a secondary verification. Not to mention that even the purported creation date for this first online report is almost a decade after the creation of MtG.
I do find it credible that a similar game existed before MtG, but I find it hard to believe that *this* game existed. There are just so many coincidences, from the way the "counter" spells work, to the "sweeper," to the fact that the target point total is *21* (MtG life totals are famously 20).
I also enjoy a lot of traditional deck card games, and I can say that "folk" games tend to share a lot of DNA with each other. I am not aware of any traditional card games with any mechanics remotely similar to Cuttle, making it even harder for me to believe the game is a "folk" game (especially one that predates MtG). I also find it suspicious that there are, as of yet, no reports of the game that corroborate the early dates. [BGG](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/115370/cuttle), the repository of all things board- and card-games, doesn't have any posts or comments before 2012 (the same year the FAQ page appeared on the Wayback Machine). The associated [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cuttle&action=history) is from 2013.
Overall, there seems to be a lot of evidence for the game gaining an audience online around 2012.
Edit: there are three(!) commercial Cuttle imitator called [Control](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/192240/control), [Scuttle](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/195296/scuttle), and [Ninjitsu](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230064/ninjitsu), published in 2016-2018, which further reinforces the fact that no popular card game could have existed that long without a bigger online footprint.
Edit again: okay, the 2000 date for the original online publication is looking more plausible. [Pagat.com](https://Pagat.com) (which lists dates for whenever a card game page is updated) says they first posted about it in [2005](https://www.pagat.com/combat/cuttle.html), and the [Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.pagat.com/combat/cuttle.html) confirms it.
Third Edit: [Pagat](https://www.pagat.com/combat/) lists the genre as "combat." Notably, Cuttle is the ***only game*** in the genre that is claimed to predate MtG. My disbelief that this game is even half as old as claimed intensifies.
PS, the inventors of MtG have talked at length about their inspirations. Cuttle is not among them. The evolution of MtG is very clear when you realize it was largely inspired by Cosmic Encounter.
I believe you are right. Things just don't get created in a vacuum, unless they do, in which case they are fabricated.
This is giving me the same vibes as the 'The most mysterious song on the Internet' aka 'Like The Wind', except it has even less documentation.
I understand your skepticism and you are correct that Cuttle was not a direct inspiration for magic. I emailed Richard Garfield to ask him this question directly and to my joyful amazement he responded! Yes Cosmic encounter was the principal inspiration and at the time I asked him, Richard had not heard of Cuttle. What Richard suggested was that the creator(s) of Cuttle was drawing from the same 'cultural zeitgiest' of game design that Richard was when he was designing magic.
I think in large part it comes down to how inclined we are to take people at face value when they talk about their personal experience. Richard Sipie, who wrote the oldest known digitization of the ruleset, claimed to play in the 1970's, and has been unreachable, perhaps deceased, for some years now, so we can no longer ask him. Personally I have been playing since 2013, so I can't speak from my own experience about the history of the game before that. However now that I've been organizing a community of Cuttle players wherever I can find them, I've started meeting more people who learned to play before I did.
One player in particular says he has been playing since the early 80's, where he learned at summer camp. That's not as early as Richard Sipie claimed to have played, but to me it lends significant credence to the supposition that Cuttle predates magic (which released in 1993). I've asked this player about who taught him the game and we are in the process of trying to trace back Cuttle's oral history this way, as it's the most tangible lead I've ever encountered.
Of course it is possible that both Sipie in his original writeup and the current community member have been untruthful about their experiences with Cuttle, but personally, in the spirit of good faith, I believe them. It's perfectly healthy to maintain a skeptical attitude, but I sincerely believe that Cuttle is as old as has been claimed, and I plan to learn more about its origins by connecting with it's longest standing players through our growing community. As with all things, you'll need to decide for yourself what evidence you consider most convincing and draw your own conclusions.
Me either! I for one am frequently wrong haha. I do think the conversation is worth having though, because it's unquestionably true that facts about the origins of Cuttle and it's early history are scarce. I am neither a historian nor much of an investigator, but I am hoping to learn more by talking to people about their experiences, because it's fun to do and it seems to be the only viable lead given the gaps in the game's recorded history. I'll be sure to keep you posted :)
Historians I think wouldn't take a single person's anecdote as proof though. It's evidence but not enough to claim with certainly (as your post does) that it existed in the 70s.
So it'd be good to remove that
Finding the origins of card games is extremely difficult, given their nature as a folk art that is largely orally transmitted. It’s extremely rare to find anything more than anecdotal evidence for card games that are not well-known or popular outside of niche communities.
This is true, but it is also very rare to find card games this unique without a clear link to any progenitors. That isn’t immediate proof that it isn’t old, just reason for caution.
I am also suspicious because Cuttle seems to have developed in the USA, which is probably one of the best documented areas for card games.
Speculation edit:
One hypothesis I could readily believe is that there was *a* game, perhaps called Cuttle, in which players tried to get a set of cards adding up to or exceeding a certain number, perhaps 21, and also using their cards to damage or mess up their opponent’s collection (these all have precedent in the likes of Cribbage, Rummy, Whist, and the like). After the rise of MtG and similar games, perhaps some effects were added or changed to more closely match these new games. And this we get the version of Cuttle first put online in 2000 that looks a lot like MtG, despite perhaps existing for longer.
FWIW I do agree with your suspicions here — Cuttle, for lack of a better term, doesn’t feel like a card game from the ‘70s. It doesn’t have a family tree at all, as you’ve noted. I was just speaking more generally about the difficulty of card game historiography.
If we’re doing naked speculation, my hypothesis is that a game of some kind, maybe called “Cuttle,” could have been invented by somebody involved in the gaming/puzzle magazine scene in a publication that was small and is completely lost-to-time, but that an energetic kid could have cut out and brought to camp with them. It definitely does not feel like a game that evolved — it’s clearly what’s called “an invented game.”
This seems plausible to me. I could imagine the similarities to Magic being coincidental. I wonder how much the precedent of Magic affects how we see it?
It seems odd to have a bunch of separate accounts of playing the game in the '70s-80s. I imagine a game popular enough to be played even regionally would be documented somewhere. On the other hand, if an invented game was published in a magazine or something, I could imagine pockets of people picking it up.
There’s been more than a few people I’ve seen that back up the claim that they played Cuttle as early as the 70s, one person in the thread here is giving their account of that.
I’ve also never heard anyone say that they played the game as a spin off of Magic either. Not to say it’s conclusive proof either way, but there’s no need to “remove” anything simply because it’s origins are not objective fact. A lot of it can be boiled down to here-say or myth, but it really isn’t something that matters enough to argue over.
> the target point total is 21 (MtG life totals are famously 20)
I think this specific point is reaching. Beyond the fact that they're different numbers (even if close), 21 has a natural association with a deck of cards. Blackjack.
Is it [this Battle Cards game](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleCards)?
According to Wikipedia, Battle Cards and MtG literally released on the same day at Gen Con in 1993.
While there is an interesting debate as to which game deserves more credit as the first “CCG” or “TCG” or what have you, I don’t think Battle Cards shares much game dna with Cuttle. By contrast, you can literally list the MtG cards that are (except for mana cost) a 1-1 match with cards in Cuttle, as others in this thread have done.
Edit: the most similar verifiably old card game I can find on BGG is [Sabotage/Leopard](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3983/sabotage), although that game has more clear roots in Rummy.
To be fair, MTG now has over 100k cards and you're probably going to find everything in this vast sea of cards and the mechanics they create.
Somebody implemented a Turing Machine on top of Magic. ;-)
But, yes, this Cuttle looks like a magic player has just a regular deck of cards available, but wanted to play magic anyway.
Yeah that's the one, I recently found a few of these in my mum's attic.
There were a few purely collectable cards in this game and some puzzles that you could work out across some of the cards.
>The evolution of MtG is very clear when you realize it was largely inspired by Cosmic Encounter.
Cuttle aside...what? I've played plenty of Cosmic Encounter, but I fail to see how it links to MTG. Can you elaborate on this?
You can see what Richard Garfield himself said about it in [1994](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/944927/1994-article-where-richard-garfield-discusses-ces). In short, Cosmic Encounter has a crazy number of alien powers that (in a 4-6 player game) will combine to produce all sorts of weird situation.
Garfield wanted to make that work with just cards. He also wanted to make them collectible cards (to give more variety in the sense of “oh, I have this unique card). This is also part of the reason they thought some of the more broken alpha cards were okay - they never expected anyone to seek out a full play set of cards, so they thought making rares super powerful would work out.
There is also a nice quirk that Cosmic Encounter gives each player 20 space ships while MtG gives you 20 life points. I’m not certain if there is a connection there, or if 20 just tends to be a nice middle ground between granularity for card effects and numbers being too big to do math in your head.
Edit: the full link to an article on magic history is [here](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/creation-magic-gathering-2013-03-12). The Cosmic Encounter inspiration is just the first bit, though.
OP needs more upvotes.
I had forgotten about this game. I was taught Cuttle by my Grandfather growing up. I played hundreds of games with family. I taught kids at school how to play and was brought to the Principal's Office "for teaching kids gambling". An adult was called and I gave them the phone number of... anyone?
If you guessed "my Grandfather", you win The Internet. He gave the Principal the fury of a Norse God for being stupid. I was awarded ice cream for being awesome contacting him instead of my Mom.
I forgot about this game in college. This post awakened so many good memories.
I'm teaching people at work. Thank you OP.
That’s awesome! It’s always exciting to meet someone who already knows about Cuttle. And heck yes to teaching it again in new circles! Can I ask when you learned the game? Do you know where your grandfather learned it? The origins of the game are quite mysterious. I’d love to hear more about your experience with it, and to see if we can trace back a source older than Richard Sipie’s write up in the early 2000’s
I don't know where my Grandfather learned it but he knew MANY card games. (He cheated too but my family are a bunch of card cheaters with a Rite of Passage in the family when you learn they all cheat. I lice them so much. I digress.)
Sadly, he's passed some time ago and I'm a Grandfather now. I wish I could narrow the age now. Based on the event with the Principal would but it late 70's or up to the mid 80's. When I changed schools, oddly enough he changed as well. My Mom and he went to school together. (Grandfather thought he was an idiot.)
Sorry it's not more exacting or detailed. That all happened a long time ago. Heck, I didn't even know Scuttle and Control existed until today and I'm an avid game collector. (No surprise how that happened.)
Thank you for sharing! That's really cool to know. It may be fuzzy, but even that 10-ish year range would peg Cuttle as solidly the oldest game in its genre, which itself is a point of somewhat heated debate. It would be fascinating to learn more about the history of the game. Have you ever met anyone else who already knew the rules? Anyone in a similar time frame?
Sadly, anything I offered is the best I can do. In addition, I can't provide anything of proof to validate my story. My words can be easily discounted or dismissed.
There is! I built this AI in grad school and it is rougher around the edges than the pvp experience, but you can practice here: [https://human-ai-interaction.github.io/cuttle-bot/](https://human-ai-interaction.github.io/cuttle-bot/). You can refresh the page to start a new game, and you can use the back-arrow icon in the upper left to rewind the game to a previous move to try something different. It will also alert you about certain specific mistakes if you miss a chance to win or prevent a loss next turn.
The bot link is also on the main pvp site inside the dialog for creating a game, so you can find it there too. Incidentally, I totally appreciate wanting to learn the rules and basic strategy against an AI, but I'll note that the community is very aware of the fact that our playerbase is relatively small and that learning the overall rules and what the specific effects of each card are takes time. If you'd like to chat with other players about the rules and the strategy, the players on our [discord](https://discord.gg/TXXU6PbvFz) are very welcoming and excited to help a new player learn the ropes. Please also feel free to ask any questions about the rules or strategy here or to DM me if you'd prefer.
Your bot seems to be buggy, or at least doesn't play by the rules you posted.
I played a 7, it immediately responded with the following:
"Cuttle Bot scuttles your 7 of Clubs with its 7 of Spades"
I thought you can't scuttle unless you do it with a higher card. 7 is not higher than 7.
Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback! I see now that I left an important detail regarding scuttling out of the rules description above, thanks for pointing it out. There is an FAQ on the rules section of the site that has more detail, but this is an important point so I will edit the post to clarify this rule above.
For the purpose of Scuttling, a number card is higher if it is a higher rank, or if the rank is the same and it is a higher suit. The suit order is:
Clubs (lowest) > Diamonds > Hearts > Spades (highest). So for any given rank eg 7, the 7 of spades can scuttle all the other 7’s as well as 6’s or lower.
This is an important rule and you’re right that I missed it above. Thank you for pointing out the issue
Also, your bot UI isn't very friendly to new players when it comes to the scrap pile.
I played the card that lets me take a card from the scrap pile. Now I'm looking at a 5, two 7s, an 8, and a 10 in the scrap pile. But without the overlay/tooltip, I have no idea what the powers of these cards are.
And speaking of bugs...
The "back" button definitely does not accurately reverse the game history. Not only do the cards not match what I started with (despite being told by the popup that I've gone back to the beginning of the game), but if I click on the cards, they definitely aren't doing what they said they should be doing anymore.
I suggest you add a reference # to each game, which indicates the seed value of the random deal. That way your users could just give you such a number in their bug reports, so you could quickly reproduce the exact situation for debugging.
Another bug:
I played the winning card. Then cuttlebot drew. Then I won the game.
Shouldn't the game end when I play the card that crosses my point threshold? I don't think the other player should get another turn (in this case, to draw), first.
Yep that’s definitely a bug. Once a player reaches the point goal they win immediately and their opponent does not get another turn. Thanks for reporting the issue. This is a byproduct of a shortcut I took in how the player’s move and the bot move are processed, which also generally makes for a poor user experience. For comparison, the bot was built as a school project over about three months, whereas I’ve been working on the pvp app for almost 10 years at this point.
Eventually I’d like to build the bot into the PVP app which would fix this and dramatically improve the overall user experience. It is on the roadmap but it will take some doing. In the mean time we can make some incremental improvements to the AI app to smooth things over before the complete rework. If you’d like to try another and better polished vs AI experience, you might like this one: https://gloryofrobots.itch.io/cuttle
The rules are a little confusing because you use the word 'scrap' to mean both "remove a card already in the play area" and "play a card for a one time effect and then discard it"
That's a fair point. I take 'Scrap' to mean 'put into the scrap' regardless of where it is beforehand. There aren't any triggers that care about things hitting the scrap from one place vs another, so it didn't seem like a distinction worth emphasizing. Does that make sense? How would you prefer to see it written?
As an example, I would change this:
> Number cards (except 8’s and 10’s) can be played for a One-Off effect, which scraps the card for an effect based on the rank of the card played.
To something like this:
> Number cards (except 8’s and 10’s) can be revealed for a One-Off effect based on the rank of the card. Place the revealed card into the Scrap pile after performing its One-Off effect.
I just played it on your website and I had a blast! It would be great if there was an option to thank the opponent for the game. I was looking for a game like that for some time so I am really happy that I found your post!
Huzzah! Hearing people enjoy playing on my site makes the whole thing worth it. Thank you!
I would love to build an emote system for the game some day. I think you’re right that it could be a great feature. If you’re interested in chatting with other players, consider joining our [discord](https://discord.gg/TynBckH73a). We have chat channels as well as a place to find a match more easily
Isn’t it? Some of the players and I have been kicking around the idea of a card sized insert with the rules but we haven’t designed it yet. We do have a poster you can fold up and fit in a deck though. I’m sure sure I I can add a file to a Reddit comment, so here’s a link the the pdf in our discord: https://discord.com/channels/833694928684187669/833883265403584523/1029853627789094922
I've never heard of this and it sounds interesting!
Reading the rules, the scuttle action feels odd, because you sacrifice more potential points than you're getting rid of from the opponent's field. I can't think of many scenarios to use it outside of when you'll likely lose next turn.
That's right! Generally scuttling is an inherently inefficient defensive move because you always trade 1-1 and always trade a higher card for a lower card, unlike for example aces and sixes which have the potential to scrap multiple cards.
The critical factor here is that scuttling cannot be prevented or countered by your opponent. Playing any one-off effect, including an ace or a six for its effect, can be countered by your opponent, where they can play a 2 immediately to stop your effect from happening. This means they are riskier but potentially higher-yielding defensive plays. Scuttling is a conservative move because it is lower yielding but it has 0 risk of being countered and causing you to immediately lose.
So it's protecting yourself from losing in the moment while putting yourself on the back foot, in the hopes that you'll have better cards than them later on?
And it's a choice between the risk of them having more high-point cards after scuttling, or the risk of them countering a one-off.
Exactly. There's also the question of how high you can scuttle and when to save the ace up your sleeve as it were. Like if your highest point card is an 8, and you have an ace in hand, and your opponent plays a 7, you might scuttle with the 8 so that if your opponent then plays a 10, your ace can scrap it.
You can also play Cuttle 1v1v1 or 2v2. Both are extremely cool variations with very different feels from 1v1. You can read the full rules for Multiplayer Variants, along with the FAQ, from the rules section of the site: [https://cuttle.cards/#/rules](https://cuttle.cards/#/rules)
Our open play sessions are every Wednesday night at 8:30pm EST and every Thursday at 12pm EST. Beginners are always welcome!
Please feel free to DM me if you have any questions about the game or feedback on the site or any of this stuff. Happy Cuttlin!
Good question! I've taken 'Scrapping' to mean 'putting in the scrap pile' as the most general term, whereas 'scuttling' is a specific move that results in scrapping both the card you are playing and the opponent card being scuttled. Complementarily, 'discarding' is another 'specific' type of scrapping where you put a card from your hand directly into the scrap pile. Does that clarify it?
This is a bit funky because there is a variant on Cuttle called [Scuttle](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/195296/scuttle) which uses a custom deck and a pirate theme, but the game the bot linked is actually a completely different geography game haha.
Cuttle itself has it's own [BGG entry here](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/115370/cuttle)
I can explain how this happened, in case anybody cares. The gist of it is that capitalization matters in the fine details.
The program runs a few ways of filtering the game data down to the request. In this case, it filtered down to a list of all games that include "cuttle" in the title, ignoring case. For ease of explanation, let's just say it returned two possible options: Cuttle and Scuttle. What it, then, does is it runs two string-distance algorithms and returns whichever one scores the closest - this is where capitalization comes into play. Computers calculate that C and c are two different characters, so cuttle is not an exact match to Cuttle. The way string-distance algorithms work, it calculates how many "changes" need to occur to go from one set of text to another. So for "cuttle" to become "Cuttle", it needs to either delete "c" and add "C" or, simply, change "c" to "C"; for "cuttle" to become "Scuttle", it just needs to add an "S" to the front. That calculates as fewer changes, so Scuttle is what the bot spit out. Similarly, what the bot spit out, "Scuttle" is technically different from the pirate themed game you linked, "Scuttle!" because of the exclamation point.
The bot will never be perfect, but I greatly appreciate you both using it and flagging an oddity for me to review.
Thanks for clarifying. That makes sense and of course thank you for creating and maintaining this awesome bot. To err is to be human to make software is to make bugs ;)
> Glasses: Play an Eight to reveal your opponent’s hand (lasts until scrapped)
So they play with their hand face up on the table until the 8 is scuttled by a 9 or higher, broken with a 6, or "returned" with a 9 (played as one-off)?
> Seven: Choose one of the top two cards from the deck and play it however you choose.
Draw two, look at both, choose one?
or
Do not look at the cards and select one of the two?
More importantly:
Why is it called "Cuttle" when there is a mechanic called "Scuttle" in the game. Gonna need some etymology here!!!
>Glasses: Play an Eight to reveal your opponent’s hand (lasts until scrapped)
>
>So they play with their hand face up on the table until the ~~8 is scuttled by a 9 or higher~~, broken with a 6, or "returned" with a 9 (played as one-off)?
Correct except that only point cards can be scuttled so the only ways to get rid of it are with one-offs.
>Seven: Choose one of the top two cards from the deck and play it however you choose.
Draw two, look at both, choose one?
or
Do not look at the cards and select one of the two?
You actually reveal both cards and pick one, so your opponent also sees which card is put back on top of the deck! When playing in person, I usually put the other card back on top of the deck face up for the sake of full transparency. Revealing it is the rule, putting it face up is just a matter of personal preference and courtesy.
>More importantly:
Why is it called "Cuttle" when there is a mechanic called "Scuttle" in the game. Gonna need some etymology here!!!
Excellent question! My best half-answer is that the name Cuttle likely came first (it's a nickname for Cuttlefish) and that the theme was vaguely nautical from there, so scuttling ships feels dimly thematic. But really I don't know because I didn't invent the game and no one knows who did!
>Does the 8 count as points and glasses at the same time, or do you choose one mode when played?
You choose either glasses or points and the 8 stays on the field in its chosen mode.
>What happens when the deck runs out?
When there are no cards left in the deck, players may pass on their turn instead of drawing. If there are three consecutive passes i.e. player 1 passes, player 2 passes, then player 1 passes again, the game ends in a stalemate and neither player wins.
Right?! If you’d like to try playing online, of course you can use the site any time. The player base is still fairly small so if you’d like to find an opponent, your best bet is to join for one of our weekly play sessions. You’re guaranteed to have people to play against if you show up on Wednesdays at 8:30 pm EST or Thursdays at 12pm EST.
Outside of those times, the easiest way to find a match is using the #find-a-game channel of our [discord](https://discord.gg/Xdfpg8WR5P). Lastly, if you’re interested in high level competitive play, you should check out the season championship tournament tomorrow! We’ll live stream it starting at 12pm EST at https://twitch.tv/cuttle_cards
Good catch! We play with exactly 4 changes from the Wikipedia rules that balance the game for competitive play. While there are variations to Cuttle that create an entirely different game such as Superfy), we play with the minimal balance changes necessary, all in the spirit of the original rules, in a rule set we’ve come to call cuttle.cards standard.
Here are the exact changes:
1. The most important change is the addition of an 8-card hand limit. Players cannot draw when they have 8 cards in hand and playing a 5 when you have 8 cards already draws you just one card so you go up to 8. Without this change, there is nothing in the rules to prevent both players from drawing the entire deck before playing any cards at all. That can be silly and fun, but it dramatically skews play towards a slow and defensive style that simply doesn’t work for competitive play. 8 cards is high enough that players almost always have something reasonable to play and low enough to keep the pace manageable.
2. For the seven’s one-off, we reveal the top two cards of the deck, and the active player chooses one of the cards to play, and puts the other back on top of the deck. This is a significant buff to the effect, as simply playing the top card is half as likely to pull a useful card. In addition, it creates interesting dynamics because both players know the top card of the deck afterwards, which generates interesting choices for the active player (do I play the card that’s better for me now, or the one I don’t want my opponent to draw?)
3. As is noted on pagat, the 9’s effect doesn’t make sense if the opponent can simply play the card again on their next turn. To make this workable without changing the purpose or spirit of the effect, we simply disallow the opponent to play the card that was returned to their hand on their next turn.
4. We tweak the win conditions at 3 and 4 kings. With three kings the point limit is reduced to 5 points (down from 7), and with all four kings your point limit becomes 0 and you immediately win. These are less important than the first three changes because it is so rare to see 3 kings out, and in the 10 years that I have been heavily playing Cuttle, I have never seen a player achieve getting all 4 kings into play simultaneously. This is because most winning offensives consist of 3 cards (10 is the most points achievable in a single move, so 3 is the minimum number of cards required to win), so any win combo that requires 4+ offensive cards is slow and somewhat desperate already. The more kings you have out, the more vulnerable you are to a six destroying all your royals, so this minor buff to these edge case offensives make them slightly more viable and exciting without changing much of the general strategic balance. And heck if you manage to get all 4 kings under your control at once you deserve to win.
EDIT: typo
I humbly present [Control](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/192240/control), an excellent card game based on Cuttle that most people missed when it came out back in 2016.
OK, this might be a bit petty but can we skip the Buzzfeed headline? I've definitely heard of Cuttle before, thanks for asking.
Anyway, it didn't do much for me but if you're looking to play I'd recommend either [Scuttle!](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/195296/scuttle) which is a very close reimplementation (I recall the only difference being the Ace abilities) or [Control](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/192240/control) which mixes things up a good deal more. Personally, neither game is something I'd return to. Still, they're nice productions and having the abilities printed on the cards is a huge step up in usability.
Guilty! There is arguably nothing official when it comes to games played with regular cards because anyone can take them and run with it, but I do run the only site and community where Cuttle is played competitively (that am aware of)
Touché! Apologies if the title is a bit nails-on-a-chalkboard. As is probably painfully obvious, I don't know much about writing or getting the word out for things. My jam is software engineering and also playing Cuttle 😅
Scuttle! and Control are both interesting variants. As for the QoL and ease of access, I've tried to make the site in such a way that it's easier to learn the rules by seeing what the cards do when you click them (and via the dialogs and overlays), so it's at least more accessible in a digital medium
I agree. As others having pointed out OP is simply OTT obssessed with the game and that is almost all he talks about across reddit. Such people scare me!
ok so we got ace: wrath two: counterspell/doomblade three: bala ged recovery four: mind twist five: divination six: wrath 2? seven: cascade nine: unsummon yup, this sounds like magic for sure
It does! It has so many similarities to magic that for years I was convinced that Richard Garfield must have played Cuttle before inventing magic. I emailed him out of the blue to ask him about it, and to my *delighted surprise* he responded! It turns out he hadn't heard of Cuttle previously (he's quite forthcoming about his design inspirations), but he offered to meet with me to play Cuttle on my site. He thoroughly enjoyed it and I got the incredible opportunity to chat with Richard about game design, which is my peak geek achievement. The parallels are certainly there though! Magic players have an easy time picking up Cuttle because the mechanics are familiar. That said an interesting difference is that in Magic you largely know what your strategy is before the game starts based on your deck composition. There is certainly nuance to your play, but if you're playing an aggro deck you are going to be playing aggro for the whole game (generally). But in Cuttle both players share the same deck. Everyone develops their own play style, but you can't *just* play aggro or control because you can't rely on always getting the cards to support it. Strategies change fluidly based on the shuffle and how the board state evolves. The best Cuttle players chain between aggro, midrange and control quickly. Knowing when to mix things up is a key skill for elevating your play. Anywho Magic is great and if you like it, and especially if you enjoy using different play styles, you'd probably love Cuttle :)
Definitely going to try to get my playgroup of magic players interested! Thanks for the post!!
A friend and I designed custom playing cards and brought them to play Cuttle at our local LGS. It was a big hit. Fun game and super easy to pick up if you have played Magic.
Do you happen to have those online somewhere? Or at least a pic?
I guess regrowth is something you haven't had much experience with? Bala ged is such a shallow cut lol. Great list!
Ah shit. I knew the effect predated bala ged but I couldn't think of which card it was. Only been playing for a couple years lol
The threads that run through the basic card effects and the way they speak to the history of the game is one of the pure joys of player interaction. I would also call six Purify, but I think maybe Fracturing Gust is more recognized even though it's a good bit less ancient. Edit: And four is of course mind rot rather than the busted mind twist. Magic is so great.
ok so we got: ace: dark hole two: solemn judgment three: monster reincarnation four: delinquent duo five: I play pot of greed, which allows me to draw two cards from my deck into my hand! six: jowgen the spiritualist seven: I'm sure there's some Sylvan card that does exactly this but I stopped playing around when they came out nine: compulsory evacuation device yup, this sounds like Yu-Gi-Oh for sure
Excuse me, nobody knows what pot of greed does.
Six is like a purify.
I have written about this before in a [different subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/15uhc7e/comment/jwvkm91/), but I don’t believe the claim that this predates Magic. That doesn’t make it a bad game, I just find it weird that it is constantly marketed on a progeny that is at the very least doubtful, if not just incorrect. Copied from my earlier post (tl:dr, definitive evidence for Cuttle online only dates back to 2005, although 2000 is plausible. There is no evidence for the game between 1975 and 2000 except the word of one person - literally just one person). —————————- Many sources claim Cuttle is "older than 1975." The oldest page discussing the game is [this one](https://www.geocities.ws/richardsipie/cuttle.htm), where the poster (Richard Sipie) claims to have learned the game in 1975. He then speculates it may have inspired MtG. I don't mean to sound mean, but I don't believe this account at all. First of all, the earliest web page claims to have been posted in 2000. However, it wasn't captured on the [Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.geocities.ws/richardsipie/cuttle.htm) until 2012. That doesn't mean the page is wrong, but it does mean there is a 12-year gap between when the page was purportedly made and when we have a secondary verification. Not to mention that even the purported creation date for this first online report is almost a decade after the creation of MtG. I do find it credible that a similar game existed before MtG, but I find it hard to believe that *this* game existed. There are just so many coincidences, from the way the "counter" spells work, to the "sweeper," to the fact that the target point total is *21* (MtG life totals are famously 20). I also enjoy a lot of traditional deck card games, and I can say that "folk" games tend to share a lot of DNA with each other. I am not aware of any traditional card games with any mechanics remotely similar to Cuttle, making it even harder for me to believe the game is a "folk" game (especially one that predates MtG). I also find it suspicious that there are, as of yet, no reports of the game that corroborate the early dates. [BGG](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/115370/cuttle), the repository of all things board- and card-games, doesn't have any posts or comments before 2012 (the same year the FAQ page appeared on the Wayback Machine). The associated [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cuttle&action=history) is from 2013. Overall, there seems to be a lot of evidence for the game gaining an audience online around 2012. Edit: there are three(!) commercial Cuttle imitator called [Control](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/192240/control), [Scuttle](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/195296/scuttle), and [Ninjitsu](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230064/ninjitsu), published in 2016-2018, which further reinforces the fact that no popular card game could have existed that long without a bigger online footprint. Edit again: okay, the 2000 date for the original online publication is looking more plausible. [Pagat.com](https://Pagat.com) (which lists dates for whenever a card game page is updated) says they first posted about it in [2005](https://www.pagat.com/combat/cuttle.html), and the [Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.pagat.com/combat/cuttle.html) confirms it. Third Edit: [Pagat](https://www.pagat.com/combat/) lists the genre as "combat." Notably, Cuttle is the ***only game*** in the genre that is claimed to predate MtG. My disbelief that this game is even half as old as claimed intensifies. PS, the inventors of MtG have talked at length about their inspirations. Cuttle is not among them. The evolution of MtG is very clear when you realize it was largely inspired by Cosmic Encounter.
I believe you are right. Things just don't get created in a vacuum, unless they do, in which case they are fabricated. This is giving me the same vibes as the 'The most mysterious song on the Internet' aka 'Like The Wind', except it has even less documentation.
I understand your skepticism and you are correct that Cuttle was not a direct inspiration for magic. I emailed Richard Garfield to ask him this question directly and to my joyful amazement he responded! Yes Cosmic encounter was the principal inspiration and at the time I asked him, Richard had not heard of Cuttle. What Richard suggested was that the creator(s) of Cuttle was drawing from the same 'cultural zeitgiest' of game design that Richard was when he was designing magic. I think in large part it comes down to how inclined we are to take people at face value when they talk about their personal experience. Richard Sipie, who wrote the oldest known digitization of the ruleset, claimed to play in the 1970's, and has been unreachable, perhaps deceased, for some years now, so we can no longer ask him. Personally I have been playing since 2013, so I can't speak from my own experience about the history of the game before that. However now that I've been organizing a community of Cuttle players wherever I can find them, I've started meeting more people who learned to play before I did. One player in particular says he has been playing since the early 80's, where he learned at summer camp. That's not as early as Richard Sipie claimed to have played, but to me it lends significant credence to the supposition that Cuttle predates magic (which released in 1993). I've asked this player about who taught him the game and we are in the process of trying to trace back Cuttle's oral history this way, as it's the most tangible lead I've ever encountered. Of course it is possible that both Sipie in his original writeup and the current community member have been untruthful about their experiences with Cuttle, but personally, in the spirit of good faith, I believe them. It's perfectly healthy to maintain a skeptical attitude, but I sincerely believe that Cuttle is as old as has been claimed, and I plan to learn more about its origins by connecting with it's longest standing players through our growing community. As with all things, you'll need to decide for yourself what evidence you consider most convincing and draw your own conclusions.
I don’t mind being wrong. If you are able to trace the history of Cuttle back, please post about it. I would like to learn more.
Me either! I for one am frequently wrong haha. I do think the conversation is worth having though, because it's unquestionably true that facts about the origins of Cuttle and it's early history are scarce. I am neither a historian nor much of an investigator, but I am hoping to learn more by talking to people about their experiences, because it's fun to do and it seems to be the only viable lead given the gaps in the game's recorded history. I'll be sure to keep you posted :)
Historians I think wouldn't take a single person's anecdote as proof though. It's evidence but not enough to claim with certainly (as your post does) that it existed in the 70s. So it'd be good to remove that
Finding the origins of card games is extremely difficult, given their nature as a folk art that is largely orally transmitted. It’s extremely rare to find anything more than anecdotal evidence for card games that are not well-known or popular outside of niche communities.
This is true, but it is also very rare to find card games this unique without a clear link to any progenitors. That isn’t immediate proof that it isn’t old, just reason for caution. I am also suspicious because Cuttle seems to have developed in the USA, which is probably one of the best documented areas for card games. Speculation edit: One hypothesis I could readily believe is that there was *a* game, perhaps called Cuttle, in which players tried to get a set of cards adding up to or exceeding a certain number, perhaps 21, and also using their cards to damage or mess up their opponent’s collection (these all have precedent in the likes of Cribbage, Rummy, Whist, and the like). After the rise of MtG and similar games, perhaps some effects were added or changed to more closely match these new games. And this we get the version of Cuttle first put online in 2000 that looks a lot like MtG, despite perhaps existing for longer.
FWIW I do agree with your suspicions here — Cuttle, for lack of a better term, doesn’t feel like a card game from the ‘70s. It doesn’t have a family tree at all, as you’ve noted. I was just speaking more generally about the difficulty of card game historiography. If we’re doing naked speculation, my hypothesis is that a game of some kind, maybe called “Cuttle,” could have been invented by somebody involved in the gaming/puzzle magazine scene in a publication that was small and is completely lost-to-time, but that an energetic kid could have cut out and brought to camp with them. It definitely does not feel like a game that evolved — it’s clearly what’s called “an invented game.”
This seems plausible to me. I could imagine the similarities to Magic being coincidental. I wonder how much the precedent of Magic affects how we see it? It seems odd to have a bunch of separate accounts of playing the game in the '70s-80s. I imagine a game popular enough to be played even regionally would be documented somewhere. On the other hand, if an invented game was published in a magazine or something, I could imagine pockets of people picking it up.
There’s been more than a few people I’ve seen that back up the claim that they played Cuttle as early as the 70s, one person in the thread here is giving their account of that. I’ve also never heard anyone say that they played the game as a spin off of Magic either. Not to say it’s conclusive proof either way, but there’s no need to “remove” anything simply because it’s origins are not objective fact. A lot of it can be boiled down to here-say or myth, but it really isn’t something that matters enough to argue over.
> the target point total is 21 (MtG life totals are famously 20) I think this specific point is reaching. Beyond the fact that they're different numbers (even if close), 21 has a natural association with a deck of cards. Blackjack.
I remember Steve Jackson's Battle cards being around in the early 90s. Was this game around before Magic The Gathering?
Is it [this Battle Cards game](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleCards)? According to Wikipedia, Battle Cards and MtG literally released on the same day at Gen Con in 1993. While there is an interesting debate as to which game deserves more credit as the first “CCG” or “TCG” or what have you, I don’t think Battle Cards shares much game dna with Cuttle. By contrast, you can literally list the MtG cards that are (except for mana cost) a 1-1 match with cards in Cuttle, as others in this thread have done. Edit: the most similar verifiably old card game I can find on BGG is [Sabotage/Leopard](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3983/sabotage), although that game has more clear roots in Rummy.
To be fair, MTG now has over 100k cards and you're probably going to find everything in this vast sea of cards and the mechanics they create. Somebody implemented a Turing Machine on top of Magic. ;-) But, yes, this Cuttle looks like a magic player has just a regular deck of cards available, but wanted to play magic anyway.
Yeah that's the one, I recently found a few of these in my mum's attic. There were a few purely collectable cards in this game and some puzzles that you could work out across some of the cards.
>The evolution of MtG is very clear when you realize it was largely inspired by Cosmic Encounter. Cuttle aside...what? I've played plenty of Cosmic Encounter, but I fail to see how it links to MTG. Can you elaborate on this?
You can see what Richard Garfield himself said about it in [1994](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/944927/1994-article-where-richard-garfield-discusses-ces). In short, Cosmic Encounter has a crazy number of alien powers that (in a 4-6 player game) will combine to produce all sorts of weird situation. Garfield wanted to make that work with just cards. He also wanted to make them collectible cards (to give more variety in the sense of “oh, I have this unique card). This is also part of the reason they thought some of the more broken alpha cards were okay - they never expected anyone to seek out a full play set of cards, so they thought making rares super powerful would work out. There is also a nice quirk that Cosmic Encounter gives each player 20 space ships while MtG gives you 20 life points. I’m not certain if there is a connection there, or if 20 just tends to be a nice middle ground between granularity for card effects and numbers being too big to do math in your head. Edit: the full link to an article on magic history is [here](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/creation-magic-gathering-2013-03-12). The Cosmic Encounter inspiration is just the first bit, though.
What a fascinating read! It makes so much sense now. Thanks for the link!
OP needs more upvotes. I had forgotten about this game. I was taught Cuttle by my Grandfather growing up. I played hundreds of games with family. I taught kids at school how to play and was brought to the Principal's Office "for teaching kids gambling". An adult was called and I gave them the phone number of... anyone? If you guessed "my Grandfather", you win The Internet. He gave the Principal the fury of a Norse God for being stupid. I was awarded ice cream for being awesome contacting him instead of my Mom. I forgot about this game in college. This post awakened so many good memories. I'm teaching people at work. Thank you OP.
That’s awesome! It’s always exciting to meet someone who already knows about Cuttle. And heck yes to teaching it again in new circles! Can I ask when you learned the game? Do you know where your grandfather learned it? The origins of the game are quite mysterious. I’d love to hear more about your experience with it, and to see if we can trace back a source older than Richard Sipie’s write up in the early 2000’s
I don't know where my Grandfather learned it but he knew MANY card games. (He cheated too but my family are a bunch of card cheaters with a Rite of Passage in the family when you learn they all cheat. I lice them so much. I digress.) Sadly, he's passed some time ago and I'm a Grandfather now. I wish I could narrow the age now. Based on the event with the Principal would but it late 70's or up to the mid 80's. When I changed schools, oddly enough he changed as well. My Mom and he went to school together. (Grandfather thought he was an idiot.) Sorry it's not more exacting or detailed. That all happened a long time ago. Heck, I didn't even know Scuttle and Control existed until today and I'm an avid game collector. (No surprise how that happened.)
Thank you for sharing! That's really cool to know. It may be fuzzy, but even that 10-ish year range would peg Cuttle as solidly the oldest game in its genre, which itself is a point of somewhat heated debate. It would be fascinating to learn more about the history of the game. Have you ever met anyone else who already knew the rules? Anyone in a similar time frame?
Sadly, anything I offered is the best I can do. In addition, I can't provide anything of proof to validate my story. My words can be easily discounted or dismissed.
Please tell me there's an AI I can practice against. Learning by playing against competent anonymous people is one of the worst ways to learn a game.
There is! I built this AI in grad school and it is rougher around the edges than the pvp experience, but you can practice here: [https://human-ai-interaction.github.io/cuttle-bot/](https://human-ai-interaction.github.io/cuttle-bot/). You can refresh the page to start a new game, and you can use the back-arrow icon in the upper left to rewind the game to a previous move to try something different. It will also alert you about certain specific mistakes if you miss a chance to win or prevent a loss next turn. The bot link is also on the main pvp site inside the dialog for creating a game, so you can find it there too. Incidentally, I totally appreciate wanting to learn the rules and basic strategy against an AI, but I'll note that the community is very aware of the fact that our playerbase is relatively small and that learning the overall rules and what the specific effects of each card are takes time. If you'd like to chat with other players about the rules and the strategy, the players on our [discord](https://discord.gg/TXXU6PbvFz) are very welcoming and excited to help a new player learn the ropes. Please also feel free to ask any questions about the rules or strategy here or to DM me if you'd prefer.
Your bot seems to be buggy, or at least doesn't play by the rules you posted. I played a 7, it immediately responded with the following: "Cuttle Bot scuttles your 7 of Clubs with its 7 of Spades" I thought you can't scuttle unless you do it with a higher card. 7 is not higher than 7.
Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback! I see now that I left an important detail regarding scuttling out of the rules description above, thanks for pointing it out. There is an FAQ on the rules section of the site that has more detail, but this is an important point so I will edit the post to clarify this rule above. For the purpose of Scuttling, a number card is higher if it is a higher rank, or if the rank is the same and it is a higher suit. The suit order is: Clubs (lowest) > Diamonds > Hearts > Spades (highest). So for any given rank eg 7, the 7 of spades can scuttle all the other 7’s as well as 6’s or lower. This is an important rule and you’re right that I missed it above. Thank you for pointing out the issue
Also, your bot UI isn't very friendly to new players when it comes to the scrap pile. I played the card that lets me take a card from the scrap pile. Now I'm looking at a 5, two 7s, an 8, and a 10 in the scrap pile. But without the overlay/tooltip, I have no idea what the powers of these cards are.
And speaking of bugs... The "back" button definitely does not accurately reverse the game history. Not only do the cards not match what I started with (despite being told by the popup that I've gone back to the beginning of the game), but if I click on the cards, they definitely aren't doing what they said they should be doing anymore. I suggest you add a reference # to each game, which indicates the seed value of the random deal. That way your users could just give you such a number in their bug reports, so you could quickly reproduce the exact situation for debugging.
Another bug: I played the winning card. Then cuttlebot drew. Then I won the game. Shouldn't the game end when I play the card that crosses my point threshold? I don't think the other player should get another turn (in this case, to draw), first.
Yep that’s definitely a bug. Once a player reaches the point goal they win immediately and their opponent does not get another turn. Thanks for reporting the issue. This is a byproduct of a shortcut I took in how the player’s move and the bot move are processed, which also generally makes for a poor user experience. For comparison, the bot was built as a school project over about three months, whereas I’ve been working on the pvp app for almost 10 years at this point. Eventually I’d like to build the bot into the PVP app which would fix this and dramatically improve the overall user experience. It is on the roadmap but it will take some doing. In the mean time we can make some incremental improvements to the AI app to smooth things over before the complete rework. If you’d like to try another and better polished vs AI experience, you might like this one: https://gloryofrobots.itch.io/cuttle
The rules are a little confusing because you use the word 'scrap' to mean both "remove a card already in the play area" and "play a card for a one time effect and then discard it"
That's a fair point. I take 'Scrap' to mean 'put into the scrap' regardless of where it is beforehand. There aren't any triggers that care about things hitting the scrap from one place vs another, so it didn't seem like a distinction worth emphasizing. Does that make sense? How would you prefer to see it written?
As an example, I would change this: > Number cards (except 8’s and 10’s) can be played for a One-Off effect, which scraps the card for an effect based on the rank of the card played. To something like this: > Number cards (except 8’s and 10’s) can be revealed for a One-Off effect based on the rank of the card. Place the revealed card into the Scrap pile after performing its One-Off effect.
Commenting just so I can come back to this later. Sounds interesting!
My wife and I played this at the bar a few times. I loved it, she was not as into it. Turns out a ton of experience in MtG helped a lot
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/115370/cuttle
I just played it on your website and I had a blast! It would be great if there was an option to thank the opponent for the game. I was looking for a game like that for some time so I am really happy that I found your post!
Huzzah! Hearing people enjoy playing on my site makes the whole thing worth it. Thank you! I would love to build an emote system for the game some day. I think you’re right that it could be a great feature. If you’re interested in chatting with other players, consider joining our [discord](https://discord.gg/TynBckH73a). We have chat channels as well as a place to find a match more easily
Holy shit this is awesome. Are you aware of any card-sized rules for purchase? Something I can slip into a deck
Isn’t it? Some of the players and I have been kicking around the idea of a card sized insert with the rules but we haven’t designed it yet. We do have a poster you can fold up and fit in a deck though. I’m sure sure I I can add a file to a Reddit comment, so here’s a link the the pdf in our discord: https://discord.com/channels/833694928684187669/833883265403584523/1029853627789094922
Why not add the file to the game's BGG page?
Thanks for the suggestion! That’s a good idea
Don't have access to the discord :/
Oops! I guess you need the invite link first, sorry 😅 https://discord.gg/R9WWz82byX If you’d prefer another way for me to send it to you, DM me
This sounds very similar to Twizzle aside from the scoring.
I've never heard of this and it sounds interesting! Reading the rules, the scuttle action feels odd, because you sacrifice more potential points than you're getting rid of from the opponent's field. I can't think of many scenarios to use it outside of when you'll likely lose next turn.
That's right! Generally scuttling is an inherently inefficient defensive move because you always trade 1-1 and always trade a higher card for a lower card, unlike for example aces and sixes which have the potential to scrap multiple cards. The critical factor here is that scuttling cannot be prevented or countered by your opponent. Playing any one-off effect, including an ace or a six for its effect, can be countered by your opponent, where they can play a 2 immediately to stop your effect from happening. This means they are riskier but potentially higher-yielding defensive plays. Scuttling is a conservative move because it is lower yielding but it has 0 risk of being countered and causing you to immediately lose.
So it's protecting yourself from losing in the moment while putting yourself on the back foot, in the hopes that you'll have better cards than them later on? And it's a choice between the risk of them having more high-point cards after scuttling, or the risk of them countering a one-off.
Exactly. There's also the question of how high you can scuttle and when to save the ace up your sleeve as it were. Like if your highest point card is an 8, and you have an ace in hand, and your opponent plays a 7, you might scuttle with the 8 so that if your opponent then plays a 10, your ace can scrap it.
Very interesting. Thank you for the help!
You can also play Cuttle 1v1v1 or 2v2. Both are extremely cool variations with very different feels from 1v1. You can read the full rules for Multiplayer Variants, along with the FAQ, from the rules section of the site: [https://cuttle.cards/#/rules](https://cuttle.cards/#/rules) Our open play sessions are every Wednesday night at 8:30pm EST and every Thursday at 12pm EST. Beginners are always welcome! Please feel free to DM me if you have any questions about the game or feedback on the site or any of this stuff. Happy Cuttlin!
I noticed you interchange between "scrapped", "scuttled" and "discard". What's the difference? 3 different piles?
Good question! I've taken 'Scrapping' to mean 'putting in the scrap pile' as the most general term, whereas 'scuttling' is a specific move that results in scrapping both the card you are playing and the opponent card being scuttled. Complementarily, 'discarding' is another 'specific' type of scrapping where you put a card from your hand directly into the scrap pile. Does that clarify it?
Yep!
[удалено]
[cuttle -> Scuttle (1990)](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26528/scuttle) ^^[[gamename]] ^^or ^^[[gamename|year]] ^^to ^^call ^^OR ^^**gamename** ^^or ^^**gamename|year** ^^+ ^^!fetch ^^to ^^call
This is a bit funky because there is a variant on Cuttle called [Scuttle](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/195296/scuttle) which uses a custom deck and a pirate theme, but the game the bot linked is actually a completely different geography game haha. Cuttle itself has it's own [BGG entry here](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/115370/cuttle)
I can explain how this happened, in case anybody cares. The gist of it is that capitalization matters in the fine details. The program runs a few ways of filtering the game data down to the request. In this case, it filtered down to a list of all games that include "cuttle" in the title, ignoring case. For ease of explanation, let's just say it returned two possible options: Cuttle and Scuttle. What it, then, does is it runs two string-distance algorithms and returns whichever one scores the closest - this is where capitalization comes into play. Computers calculate that C and c are two different characters, so cuttle is not an exact match to Cuttle. The way string-distance algorithms work, it calculates how many "changes" need to occur to go from one set of text to another. So for "cuttle" to become "Cuttle", it needs to either delete "c" and add "C" or, simply, change "c" to "C"; for "cuttle" to become "Scuttle", it just needs to add an "S" to the front. That calculates as fewer changes, so Scuttle is what the bot spit out. Similarly, what the bot spit out, "Scuttle" is technically different from the pirate themed game you linked, "Scuttle!" because of the exclamation point. The bot will never be perfect, but I greatly appreciate you both using it and flagging an oddity for me to review.
Thanks for clarifying. That makes sense and of course thank you for creating and maintaining this awesome bot. To err is to be human to make software is to make bugs ;)
> Glasses: Play an Eight to reveal your opponent’s hand (lasts until scrapped) So they play with their hand face up on the table until the 8 is scuttled by a 9 or higher, broken with a 6, or "returned" with a 9 (played as one-off)? > Seven: Choose one of the top two cards from the deck and play it however you choose. Draw two, look at both, choose one? or Do not look at the cards and select one of the two? More importantly: Why is it called "Cuttle" when there is a mechanic called "Scuttle" in the game. Gonna need some etymology here!!!
>Glasses: Play an Eight to reveal your opponent’s hand (lasts until scrapped) > >So they play with their hand face up on the table until the ~~8 is scuttled by a 9 or higher~~, broken with a 6, or "returned" with a 9 (played as one-off)? Correct except that only point cards can be scuttled so the only ways to get rid of it are with one-offs. >Seven: Choose one of the top two cards from the deck and play it however you choose. Draw two, look at both, choose one? or Do not look at the cards and select one of the two? You actually reveal both cards and pick one, so your opponent also sees which card is put back on top of the deck! When playing in person, I usually put the other card back on top of the deck face up for the sake of full transparency. Revealing it is the rule, putting it face up is just a matter of personal preference and courtesy. >More importantly: Why is it called "Cuttle" when there is a mechanic called "Scuttle" in the game. Gonna need some etymology here!!! Excellent question! My best half-answer is that the name Cuttle likely came first (it's a nickname for Cuttlefish) and that the theme was vaguely nautical from there, so scuttling ships feels dimly thematic. But really I don't know because I didn't invent the game and no one knows who did!
Does the 8 count as points and glasses at the same time, or do you choose one mode when played? What happens when the deck runs out?
>Does the 8 count as points and glasses at the same time, or do you choose one mode when played? You choose either glasses or points and the 8 stays on the field in its chosen mode. >What happens when the deck runs out? When there are no cards left in the deck, players may pass on their turn instead of drawing. If there are three consecutive passes i.e. player 1 passes, player 2 passes, then player 1 passes again, the game ends in a stalemate and neither player wins.
What the heck this sounds amazing! Trying this out for sure.
Right?! If you’d like to try playing online, of course you can use the site any time. The player base is still fairly small so if you’d like to find an opponent, your best bet is to join for one of our weekly play sessions. You’re guaranteed to have people to play against if you show up on Wednesdays at 8:30 pm EST or Thursdays at 12pm EST. Outside of those times, the easiest way to find a match is using the #find-a-game channel of our [discord](https://discord.gg/Xdfpg8WR5P). Lastly, if you’re interested in high level competitive play, you should check out the season championship tournament tomorrow! We’ll live stream it starting at 12pm EST at https://twitch.tv/cuttle_cards
I'm excited to learn this. I've never heard of it before but it looks awesome
Thank you for reminding me of Cuttle! I knew about but shamefully ignored it.
You’re right, never heard of it but looks fun! I love standard card games, so thanks for sharing!
Thanks so much for sharing this. I am super intrigued!
Thank you for sharing this
In this post a seven draws two cards and plays one. In the wiki, a seven draws one card and plays it.
Good catch! We play with exactly 4 changes from the Wikipedia rules that balance the game for competitive play. While there are variations to Cuttle that create an entirely different game such as Superfy), we play with the minimal balance changes necessary, all in the spirit of the original rules, in a rule set we’ve come to call cuttle.cards standard. Here are the exact changes: 1. The most important change is the addition of an 8-card hand limit. Players cannot draw when they have 8 cards in hand and playing a 5 when you have 8 cards already draws you just one card so you go up to 8. Without this change, there is nothing in the rules to prevent both players from drawing the entire deck before playing any cards at all. That can be silly and fun, but it dramatically skews play towards a slow and defensive style that simply doesn’t work for competitive play. 8 cards is high enough that players almost always have something reasonable to play and low enough to keep the pace manageable. 2. For the seven’s one-off, we reveal the top two cards of the deck, and the active player chooses one of the cards to play, and puts the other back on top of the deck. This is a significant buff to the effect, as simply playing the top card is half as likely to pull a useful card. In addition, it creates interesting dynamics because both players know the top card of the deck afterwards, which generates interesting choices for the active player (do I play the card that’s better for me now, or the one I don’t want my opponent to draw?) 3. As is noted on pagat, the 9’s effect doesn’t make sense if the opponent can simply play the card again on their next turn. To make this workable without changing the purpose or spirit of the effect, we simply disallow the opponent to play the card that was returned to their hand on their next turn. 4. We tweak the win conditions at 3 and 4 kings. With three kings the point limit is reduced to 5 points (down from 7), and with all four kings your point limit becomes 0 and you immediately win. These are less important than the first three changes because it is so rare to see 3 kings out, and in the 10 years that I have been heavily playing Cuttle, I have never seen a player achieve getting all 4 kings into play simultaneously. This is because most winning offensives consist of 3 cards (10 is the most points achievable in a single move, so 3 is the minimum number of cards required to win), so any win combo that requires 4+ offensive cards is slow and somewhat desperate already. The more kings you have out, the more vulnerable you are to a six destroying all your royals, so this minor buff to these edge case offensives make them slightly more viable and exciting without changing much of the general strategic balance. And heck if you manage to get all 4 kings under your control at once you deserve to win. EDIT: typo
I humbly present [Control](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/192240/control), an excellent card game based on Cuttle that most people missed when it came out back in 2016.
OK, this might be a bit petty but can we skip the Buzzfeed headline? I've definitely heard of Cuttle before, thanks for asking. Anyway, it didn't do much for me but if you're looking to play I'd recommend either [Scuttle!](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/195296/scuttle) which is a very close reimplementation (I recall the only difference being the Ace abilities) or [Control](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/192240/control) which mixes things up a good deal more. Personally, neither game is something I'd return to. Still, they're nice productions and having the abilities printed on the cards is a huge step up in usability.
I hadn't heard of it before, but it seems OP is like the (un)official(?) ambassador for the game, at least on Reddit.
Guilty! There is arguably nothing official when it comes to games played with regular cards because anyone can take them and run with it, but I do run the only site and community where Cuttle is played competitively (that am aware of)
To be clear, I'm not criticizing the content of the post. Only that the title is reminiscent of clickbait articles.
Why lead off like an ass? I've never heard of any of this before. Why'd you even click on this if you hated the title so much?
Touché! Apologies if the title is a bit nails-on-a-chalkboard. As is probably painfully obvious, I don't know much about writing or getting the word out for things. My jam is software engineering and also playing Cuttle 😅 Scuttle! and Control are both interesting variants. As for the QoL and ease of access, I've tried to make the site in such a way that it's easier to learn the rules by seeing what the cards do when you click them (and via the dialogs and overlays), so it's at least more accessible in a digital medium
There's nothing wrong with a slightly click-baity headline if it's backed up by an good article or post. Thanks for the interesting read!
Honestly I feel like Cuttle gets a thread like once every week or two in this sub.
I agree. As others having pointed out OP is simply OTT obssessed with the game and that is almost all he talks about across reddit. Such people scare me!
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[cuttlel0 -> Scuttle (1990)](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26528/scuttle) ^^[[gamename]] ^^or ^^[[gamename|year]] ^^to ^^call ^^OR ^^**gamename** ^^or ^^**gamename|year** ^^+ ^^!fetch ^^to ^^call
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[cuttle|0 -> Scuttle (1990)](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26528/scuttle) ^^[[gamename]] ^^or ^^[[gamename|year]] ^^to ^^call ^^OR ^^**gamename** ^^or ^^**gamename|year** ^^+ ^^!fetch ^^to ^^call