Rogue Hand: poker where the joker decides, not the ace
In poker you compare your hand with other players. Here there are none: there is only a blind — a target you must beat within four hands and three discards. So Rogue Hand is not won by whoever makes four of a kind, but by whoever understands what the score is made of.
Score = (base + cards) × multiplier
Every hand has its own base: a pair is 10 chips × 2, a flush is 35 × 4, four of a kind is 60 × 7. The values of the played cards are added to that base, and the whole sum is multiplied by the hand's multiplier. Pair of aces: 10 + 11 + 11 = 32 chips × 2 — 64 points. Worst possible flush: 35 × 4 — 140 points without a single card value.
Hence the first rule: chips accumulate, the multiplier multiplies, and multiplier is useless without chips.
Why the deck matters more than the hand
A piece falls into the middle column and never shifts again. So the choice is made BEFORE it lands: you look at the two-piece queue and decide where the current one goes. Discards are limited and get spent rebuilding the deck around a strategy — usually around a joker you already hold.
Card enhancements: four steps
- Foil — +30 chips when played. Cheap, predictable, adds to the base.
- Holographic — +10 to the multiplier. Stronger when you already have chips banked.
- Polychrome — ×1.5 to the whole multiplier. The strongest enhancement, and exactly why it is dead without chips.
- Gold — pays 3 gold when played and at the end of the round. That is economy, not score.
Three kinds of shop items
Jokers (max five) — passive powers and the only way to beat the boss. The deck is built around them: if a joker pays for odd cards, you draw odd cards.
Planets — permanently raise a specific hand's base. That is a long-game investment, and the level of the hand is visible in the scoring panel and in the deck statistics.
Boosters — turn a random deck card into an enhanced one.
Where a run breaks
The boss blind is not stronger only in target — roughly five times the small one. You cannot take it with one strong hand: you need a banked multiplier, which means jokers and holographics. That is why taking a joker between blinds is almost always better than a planet: the planet pays on the next blind, the joker changes this one.
The second place a run breaks is discards. Spent on the first card you disliked, they leave you with no tool to rebuild before the boss.