Everyone is falling. And fighting. The object of the game is to hit the ground last.
It's not much of a goal, but it's all you could think of on the way down.
FALLING was the first real time card game from James Ernest (others include BRAWL and Fightball). It's a frenetic card game with an average play time of 90 seconds.
One player deals while the other players fall. There are no turns; everyone is playing at once. Players can play cards on each other, called "riders," that change how the dealer will deal to them. A "Hit" means "give me more cards." A "Skip" means "don't give me anything." And so on. Those Skips are really handy at the bottom of the deck, when the dealer starts handing out the Ground cards. Get one of those, and you're out.
FALLING was nominated for an Origins award for best traditional card game of 1998, and was listed in the GAMES 100 for the same year. You can still buy the Goblin edition of FALLING from Paizo.com, and if you speak Polish (or feel like learning eight Polish words) you can also play Spadamy!, which is the same exact game but with cows. If you can find a copy.
The files below contain the original Brian Snoddy artwork for FALLING, and the rules from the original game, updated into the new free Cheapass format. There is even a page explaining different ways to put your deck together, from basically free to ridiculously expensive.
The elements:
- FALLING Rule Book (970 K)
- FALLING Card Fronts (1.9 MB)
- FALLING Card Backs (112 K)
- FALLING Box Label (842 K)
A note about the box label: It probably won't fit your box exactly. If it doesn't, just chop it up into smaller pieces and apply each piece to the sides of your box. We formatted it as one piece in case you had the perfect size tuck box. Which means, exactly like the one we happened to use.
We have also set up a FALLING project at Arts Cow, a print-on-demand specialty printer in Hong Kong. The card quality isn't bad, but it's pretty expensive. With shipping, pre-discounts, this deck will run you about $15, and take about three weeks to ship. Remember, if you print your deck this way, we don't get any piece of the money.
Thanks to the overwhelming response to FALLING, we are thinking about getting new card art from Brian Snoddy, for a bunch of clever new cards that we want to add: Helicopter, Parachute, Anvil, Cliff, Bowl of Petunias, and more. Keep those donations coming, kids. Brian Snoddy art ain't free.
