"Well, that was a bit hairy," Mad Barrington mused as he slurped his shark fin soup.
"Especially the part with the zombie vampire sharks," Flynt shivered as he remembered the horrible moans of the undead sharks with frickin lasers, "hopefully thats the last well see of them."
"Were probably still a couple days out of Sea-At, provided that mast holds together," Barrington noted pointing at functional structure that more resembled the Leaning Tower of Pisa than a sea worthy mast, "and the winds blow in our favour. Glim a game of Bandersnatch to pass the time?"
"Id rather get punched in the face repeatedly," Flynt answered, "which I believe I was the last time I played."
"East End rules then, personally I prefer the Code Duello format but given that were without seconds…"
"Id prefer to avoid any rules that involve me getting pummelled for your amusement," Flynt opined having spent the last few days fighting off zombies, vampires, aliens, sharks with frickin lasers and some bizarre combinations of the aforementioned monsters.
"We still have a couple bottles of absinthe left, shots then?" Barrington offered, a deck of Bandersnatch cards in his left hand.
Flynt weighed his options, two more days of listening to Lord Barrington without a sky castle recount the same tales of adventures with minor variations each time, or a few rounds of cards and alcohol that packed a punch slightly less painful than the East End rules of Bandersnatch. "I deal first…"
In Bandersnatch the card game (not to be confused with Bandersnatch the run for your life game) players use a completely non-standard deck of 62 cards consisting of zombies, vampires, aliens and sharks in assorted colours along with cards that give bonuses and penalties to try and collect sets of cards giving them the most points while simultaneously trying to frustrate the efforts of their opponent. Each round five cards are flipped over and each player selects two before their opponent picks one to be discarded. You’ll need to bluff to keep your opponent from tossing the cards you want to keep while also remembering the cards you want to collect (no peeking at the ones you’ve already put aside) and the cards your opponent is trying to collect. Combined with a planning phase where you put aside two cards unknown to your opponent and a transfer phase where you pass two cards to your opponent (good time to get rid of those penalty cards I mentioned before), Bandersnatch is a quick game of choices, decisions and just the right level of friendly frustration that will make you want to keep playing just one more game.
Bandersnatch is a post-??? card game set in a world with sky castles (Beamish), stock markets populated by cockroaches in business suits (Mad Barringtons Gyre) and the aforementioned zombies, vampires, aliens and sharks (Outgrabe). This part of the story takes place during a quiet interlude.