Every game starts somewhere. For 이차 (2nd Stop), it started with a night out in Seoul.
이차, literally "second stop", is what Koreans call the second venue of a night out. You finish dinner, someone suggests one more drink, and suddenly you're deep into a fried chicken restaurant at midnight, mixing soju into beer and wondering how you got here. That feeling of a night that slowly gets away from you is exactly what I wanted to capture in a card game.
"You're not just playing cards. You're managing how drunk your character is getting, in real time, across the whole night."
The Core Idea
The game is a trick-taking card game for four players (initially, although I need to explore a broader player range once I bed down the gameplay), but with an inversion at its heart: winning too much is dangerous. Every card you play moves you along a personal Drunk Track. Go too high and you've had too much. Your round is forfeit. Go higher still and you're out entirely.
The suits map directly onto the night out theme. The first sketch was messier than this. It had a Cola suit and two separate Chicken suits. But the four that survived are the ones that earn their place:
🍺
Beer
The standard drink. A full suit numbered 1 to 13. Moderate drunk cost. The bread and butter of the game.
🥃
Soju
The dangerous one. A smaller suit (only 11 cards) but they hit harder. Soju moves you further per point of face value.
🍗
Chicken
Food offsets alcohol. Chicken is the main food suit. High values soak up a lot of drunk movement.
🥗
Banchan
The small sides. Kimchi, pickled radish, the little dishes. Lighter food mitigation than chicken.
On each turn, a player leads with a drink card and takes a food card from the shared table. Your net drunk movement is drink value minus food value. Eat well and you barely feel it, eat nothing and it hits hard. The winner of the trick is whoever drinks the most, no matter how much they eat. I am also currently toying with the idea of must-follow in relation to either the alcohol drunk or the food eaten. I think this will create opportunities for manipulation of other players and it works thematically, but we will see how it goes during testing.
While whoever drinks the most is the winner of the trick, the winner of the round is whoever is the highest on the drunk metre without going over the round limit. Thematically it represents being a strong drinker who is able to stay in control. I do have other ideas for how this might work. For example, do you eliminate whoever ate the most chicken (being greedy at the shared table is not ok). But again I will see how it goes with the game without this first and add if needed.
The Drunk Track
Every player has their own Drunk Track, a personal meter from 0 to a ceiling. The track doesn't reset between rounds. The night accumulates. Three escalating rounds raise the ceiling each time: Round 1 is relatively safe, Round 2 carries real risk, Round 3 is genuine danger.
The 소맥 Bomb
I wanted to include this thematically but will see if it survives mechanically in the game. 소맥 (somaek) is a Korean cocktail made by mixing a shot of soju into a glass of beer. It's famously one of the most efficient ways to get very drunk, very quickly.
💣 The Bomb
Beer + Soju combined. The bomb always wins the trick, but you don't get to eat food to offset it. Cost = Soju value + 5. It's a pure drunk play. Powerful and reckless, exactly like the real thing.
Where We Are
This is the raw concept. The idea before simulation or playtesting. The suits are defined. The core loop is there. The bomb exists. The Drunk Track exists.
But there are real problems to solve. I need to work out the deck structure because currently I am guessing at what combination will work. I will need to run simulations and playtest to further refine the make-up of this deck. The same can be said for the balance of food against drink and what scale the drunk track needs to have to keep the game tight but not be punishing. This is something I will look to stress test and hopefully work through before my next update.
