Retribution1973 2026

Retribution is a two-player game played with a standard 52-card deck. The players alternate turning up cards one at a time from a single shuffled deck and placing them face up on the table. Thirty-six cards are played in all, forming four boxes of nine cards each — three rows of three. Each placement after a box's first card must touch a card already in that box, edge or corner, and no box may grow beyond three cards in either direction. Each player is credited with the points scored in two of the four boxes, but either player may play any card into any box. Ownership of a box is declared by whoever places its first card. Much of the game turns on that freedom: a card that would complete a hand in an opponent's box is a card you would rather put elsewhere, and spoiling a box is often worth more than scoring in your own. A finished box contains eight three-card poker hands — its three rows, its three columns, and its two diagonals. These score as follows: pair 1 point, flush 2, straight 3, three of a kind 4, straight flush 5. Aces count high or low, and a single ace may be high in one hand and low in another. The player with more points wins; tied games are replayed with the same player leading. Nothing is hidden. Every card played stays face up for the rest of the game, so there is no memory element and no bluffing. The difficulty lies entirely in judging where a card does the most good and the least harm, and in reading what the arrangement still permits. A game takes roughly fifteen minutes, and matches are played to an agreed number of games won. Retribution shares a lineage with Poker Squares and Cribbage Squares — cards placed one at a time into a grid and scored as poker hands — but differs in that both players build into a single shared tableau rather than filling private grids, and may play into each other's scoring areas.

—description from the designer