Game #75: Fruitcakes by Zomulgustar

It isn't done baking yet, but I figured I'd throw in this Christmas-y filler (stocking stuffer?) while the spirit lingers. I'm hoping that it contains the seeds of a rock-solid game, but those might just be nuts.
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FRUITCAKES (C) 2005 Andrew Juell
Ages 10 to adult
4-8 players

EQUIPMENT
96 Gift Cards (8 colors, numbered from -6 to +6 with no 0)
96 Gift Tags (8 colors, 12 small cubes each with one marked side)

OVERVIEW
On each of the Twelve Days of Christmas, the players give each other the gift that keeps on giving: fruitcake. Though some of the packages you'll receive will start to look mighty familiar before the season is over, you can't keep regifting forever. Sooner or later, you're just stuck with them. When it's all over, you don't really want to be the person with the most fruitcake...I mean, who actually eats the stuff? It's more important to give than to receive, after all, and if you can give the best gifts even to the people who have everything, you can relax in the knowledge of a job well done.

SETUP
Sort out the cards and cubes so that each player has a complete set of 12 each with matching colors. The player who most recently ate fruitcake goes first. If none of the players are brave enough to have done this, determine the starting player randomly.

PLAY
Each turn, you choose a fruitcake card to place face down in front of another player ('under their tree'). Place one of your tags, marked side up, on the present to indicate that you are the most recent giver. You may choose to give a new fruitcake by playing from your hand, or you may re-gift one from under your tree. If regifting, turn the visible marked side down to avoid confusion. Note that you may examine the values of the fruitcakes under your tree at any time.

There are two restrictions on (re)gifting. First, 'no tagbacks': you may not give a fruitcake back to the person who gave it to you. Regifting is tacky enough as it is, after all. Secondly, you can't play favorites: if a gift would result in a player having too many tags of any single color under their tree, you have to give it to someone else...or you might be stuck with it. Note that the tag you add to the gift as you give it counts towards this limit. The maximum allowed tags of each color varies with the number of players in the game:

Players......Tags
..4...........4..
..5-6.........3..
..7+..........2..

However, if nobody notices these breaches of etiquette and the next player's turn is completed, you're considered to have gotten away with it and play continues normally. (edited to add) You only give one gift each 'day', so once your turn is over, play passes to the left.

VICTORY:
After the last player gives his twelfth and final gift, the game is over and the winner is determined. This is a two step process: first, the player with the most valuable gifts is identified. All fruitcake cards are turned face up, taking care to preserve the association between the cards and the cubes. Each player then totals the values printed on the cards in front of them. The players who do not have the highest total discard the cards and cubes in front of them, but retain those of all players involved in a tie for highest. All unplayed cards left over in players' hands are discarded as well. Only the remaining cards will be used in determining victory.

Now each player multiplies the value printed on the remaining cards by the number of cubes of their color on each. Thus, a player with two cubes on a +3 card and one cube on a -2 card scores (2*3)+(1*-2)=6-2=4 points. The player with the most points wins. Players tied for the most points share victory.

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This is my first writeup of the rules, so please forgive any obvious typos/blunders, as I've got a LOT on my plate right now. While I'm still wide open to suggestions for rules changes, my primary concern is with the theme. While fruitcakes are commonly associated with regifting in sub-upper-crust America (and generally in a humorous rather than offensive light), they do not occcupy a similar role in Europe to the best
of my knowledge, and regifting itself might be several more notches twward being outright offensive as well. Any feedback on likely reactions from German companies would be especially appreciated, as well as any fixes which would make the idea more palatable. Some of the mechanics originated from a half-formed game of Machiavellian politics (see below), but I really think the fruitcake theme works better with this...would it be better to retheme completely?

Even if the theme is acceptable, some playtest feedback indicates it might be enhanced substantially by adding backstory, most specifically including a compact noun indicating the player who received the greatest total value of gifts in an intuitively justified way. Anything else that helps justify the victory condition better would also be welcome.

The first playtest used simple colored cubes as labels, and thus didn't have the 'no tagbacks' restriction, as it was unenforceable. The second playtest used stackable chips, which clearly indicated the most recent giver, but made it more difficult to scan other players' presents to determine if a particular gift/regift was legal. I'm currently planning on marking one side of each of the cubes, but if anyone has any better ideas, I'm all ears. Graphic design was never my forte.

The design began with the ending: what if I could turn what would normally be a kingmaker effect into the central point of a game and make it work? You can never directly help yourself, but you don't really want to be the king anyway...you want to be the power behind the throne. The victory condition suggested a theme, but to keep things interesting it seemed that other players should have a way of knowing what favors other players had done for each other, and then the thought came that they could pass the favor on...which connected to 'regifting' and the current theme. Of course, this necessitates extensive hidden trackable information, which is normally a big no-no in my book, but I'm hoping that two wrongs will make a right, or at least three lefts.

As for actual rules issues, the original decks were positive 1-8 except 6, negative 1 to 5. Several players felt that the negative cards should be stronger, so I'm putting this tweaked version here for now. I'm concerned that the low-absolute-value cards will always see very little play, but there's no obvious way to prevent a lockup unless a player can ALWAYS give from his hand. Is there a simple way to reduce the handsize while avoiding lockup? Less useless cards means cheaper production, after all.

Speaking of lockup, it's also the reason why the turn order is simple pass-to-the-left. Several players indicated that it seemed more natural to have the new player-to-move be the player who was given the last gift, but I couldn't find a simple workaround for a clique of people giving to each other cyclically and locking the others out. If you have any suggestions which would fix this, they'd be quite welcome.

The 'no playing favorites' rule is a little bit kludgy, but turned out to have
pleasant emergent effects in play while simultaneously preventing a degenerate strategy of everyone piling gifts on a single unfortunate player. I might try a game or two using a more straightforward version, keeping track of the number of times you've given a gift to each other player, rather than the tags in front of them. Though simpler to say and a bit more intuitive, it would require additional components to track, and I suspect would not do nearly as much to prevent pileons...or endless circulating fruitcakes for that matter...I like the idea of ones you just can't get rid of.

To encourage more use of negatives, it was proposed that a card's value should be inverted in sign if it ends up under the tree of the original giver. As a generalization of this, it was also proposed to make each gift worth a different value to each player color, simultaneously making it more realistic and less easily duplicable with a few standard card decks. However, one of my playtesters felt that a lot of the appeal of the game lay in the ability of experienced players to track the cards, and this would make it substantially more difficult to do. Also, it was proposed to replace the near-zero gifts with collectables that are near-worthless individually, but greatly increase in value the more of them end up under the same
tree. Do any of these ideas, or one of your own, especially appeal/seem appropriate? Or is the game near-overcomplicated as it is?

It was also suggested, since there was frequently no way of passing on a particularly troublesome fruitcake toward the end of the game, that each player would be allowed to use their turn to eat a fruitcake under their tree once per game. I've yet to test this, but it doesn't seem like it would be too unbalancing...but is it necessary? It was also suggested to have the last person to give each gift count for more points in the final scoring...haven't tried this yet, though.

I'm guessing that 8 players might make the memory issues too difficult, but I'm not sure where to put the cutoff, short of extensive playtesting. Also, I'm struggling to support <4 players with this game, though I'm convinced it's possible. The game seems to work with three players simply by removing the 'no tagbacks' rule and upping the tag limit to 6, but the former change seems counterthematic. Shuffling the deck of a
fourth color and splitting those color cubes evenly among the real players might work, letting them take turns as any color they have as they wish...call it 'Secret Santa' I suppose. Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance for your feedback!