Puffins In Hats

As I have been drawing a picture every day this year, some themes have developed, more or less without planning, and one of those is puffins. I think I have drawn more puffins than anything else, and I have semi-joked on a few occasions that I would make a game about puffins at some point in the near future. The problem was that I had no coherent idea to base such a game on. Would the game be based on actual puffin behaviour? Would it have an ecological message? (After all, puffins, via their food supplies, are vulnerable to climate change as has been seen by the recent population crash in Pacific Tufted Puffins.) Or would I go for something lighter and cuter?

Then one day, completely on a whim I drew a few sketches of slightly cartoony puffins wearing assorted hats.

Day 183: Puffins in Hats.

I'm not sure why I did that, but I had a load of enthusiastic feedback about it through social media and then the phrases "puffins in hats" and "nuffin' but cats" came to mind. Any pretence of a worthy, serious (ish) game went out of the window and I couldn't think of anything but that. 

Given that pair of phrases, my brain went to a game where you have cards, most of which have puffins on them, in an assortment of hats, and you are trying to collect either a variety of different hats, or all the same type of hat.  Some of the cards have cats on, though, and the cats chase away puffins, "poison" your hand, or otherwise cause you problems, so you are trying to avoid getting them. BUT, if you end up with "nuffin' but cats", you win the game (or at least the hand), a bit like "shooting the moon" in other games like, for example, Hearts.

I'm musing over ways to make this happen at the moment, and there are a load of options on how to do it: drafting cards in some way, auctioning, trick taking, etc.  My current favourite is a variation on trick taking, where everyone starts with a mixed hand of cards, and plays a card in turn (not quite sure on the way this is controlled right now), and whoever "wins" the trick (i.e. everyone plays a card and the "top" card is determined by some rule -- probably based on the cards having numerical values) takes all the cards into their hand. If they have a "legal hand" (a bit like going out in Gin Rummy), they declare it and win the hand, otherwise they start a fresh trick. If you win a trick and there is a cat in it, then you lose one or more cards, but if there is more than one cat in the trick, then it is handled in a different way which I am not sure about; maybe the highest value cat player wins in that case and something special happens.

I don't think this would be stable as it stands, and the changing hand sizes and the lack of cards actually leaving play (as usually happens in a trick-taking game) could be a problem, so I need to work on that.

Anyway, this is all just ideas at the moment, while I should be thinking about other things, but I thought I would write down and share my current state as it might encourage me to take the game forwards at some time.  I should actually be able to play a very basic test of the game using a regular deck of playing cards, to at least work out the general flow of play, though I think I probably want more than four suits (or hats) for this game.