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“NERTS!” was shouted, ending a round of the new free Zachtronics game Nerts!. But how did we get here?
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A busy explainer provided by Zachtronics to learn how to play. More context below.
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Six players start a round by turning the cards simultaneously in their four stacks.
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More aces are placed in the central pool, which everyone can access (and thus increases the appearance of online competition), while everyone tries to empty their “Nerts stack” to score more points in a round.
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Options menu. The only “microtransaction” in the game is that each player can unlock a custom deck with the Zachtronics theme when owning the respective game on Steam. They are all very radical games, although much more complicated than Nerts!, so we recommend trying some of them if you have an appetite for games with circuit rewiring or chemical engineering as concepts.
We know video games as escapism during the pandemic, especially games that bring online friends together with simple yet profound gameplay. That same premise catapulted Among us, an independent game discreetly released from 2018, to the top of the 2020 charts and headlines.
After just a week, 2021 has already started as a … fun year, which led me to the unusual step of highlighting a new free multiplayer card game on Windows, Mac and Linux that we couldn’t otherwise cover at Ars Technica: Nerts! One reason is that it is currently the “best new game” of 2021 – admittedly a silly designation just seven days after the start of the year, but I’m counting.
You must have already tripped Nerts! as a child, perhaps calling it a Pounce or Racing Demon, as it is a modified version of patience for larger groups of players – a fact that game developers at Zachtronics freely admit (and perhaps play with the price of free beer) video below tells the story, although you want to read my context to analyze it better.
Nerts! six player battle.
Up to six players can compete in Nerts!, and everyone gets their own 52 card deck. The cards are arranged in a patience style, with four placed as starting “stacks”, 13 in a special “Nerts stack” and the rest as a draw deck. As in patience, your stacks can be constructed as decreasing numerical counts (KQJ-10-9 and so on) with alternating red-black colors, and the ace cards go to their own dumpster, to extract letters from their stacks ( in ascending numerical order with a matching suit).
The first problem: this is multiplayer, so the middle of the screen is a shared aces pool. As soon as someone drops, say, an ace of spades, anyone with a two of spades can throw his in the center to reduce his deck.
In addition, since each player gets only four stacks to work with, instead of the standard count of seven stacks of patience, you can place any card in an empty place, not just a king.
Most importantly, you earn more points by getting rid of all the cards in your Nerts stack: two points per removal, as opposed to one point per card moved to the aces reserve. (If you don’t win a round, you lose points for each card remaining in your Nerts stack.) The first one wins at 100 points. All of this means that your way to victory is to manage that strange stack of 13 cards within your limited stack series and a crazy battle of shared aces.
High tick rate for patience antics
This game entered our radar because of its pedigree. Zachtronics, a Seattle area game studio, is best known for delusionally complicated games like SpaceChem, Infinifativeand Exapunks. It turns out that these developers sometimes play simpler games to clean up their design palates while developing games, usually in a shared office with physical cards. The 2020 pandemic changed that, so the studio decided to code its own virtual version to keep the office tradition alive – so it cleaned up the app for public consumption and released it on Steam on Tuesday this week.
The result is a few levels above “barebones”, which means that the free game lacks a clear tutorial and an integrated combo menu, but is still quite robust. To start with, a hotfix appeared the day after the game was released to add a Steam “lobby invitation” shortcut URL that works even if someone is not on your friends list, which you can easily put on a Discord channel or Slack to bring new players into your sessions. In addition, the Zachtronics network code is very good here, as it tracks each player’s mouse cursor at an apparent tick rate of 30 Hz – meaning you can place the mouse cursor in the card fields of your enemies as a form of communication or provocation (or, if you’re cooler, use the mouse cursor to Help friends struggling aiming for the ideal moves).
This package seems to “get what you paid for” in certain obvious ways, like a 15-second theme song that plays at the beginning of each session with no option to disable it at press time. At first, I was irritated by this forced pause, but I learned to appreciate the cheesy and too long jingle as part of Nerts! ritual. The most difficult things come from sessions with less than four players, where players can more easily crawl into a corner of patience “without moving to the left”. Nerts! tries to help with this by automatically shuffling each player’s “buy three” deck after a certain amount of time, which can put useful cards in your arsenal when you’re stuck, but the developers have already suggested changes to the rules in a future patch for lower player scores.
Ultimately, Zachtronics’ free version of the classic battle-solitaire is already better than what you’ll find on free web browser game portals (and we strongly believe in support for Linux and Mac on the first day by those parties) . Nerts! offers a beautiful mix of card shuffling activity for greater focus and pause downtime to reflect for silly voice chat – the exact kind of brain-activated social game that I was looking forward to in a world with fewer game nights board with friends. It’s a wonderful gift of affordable card battle games, and you shouldn’t hesitate to download and test it even in its release state, even before more potential patches arrive at this free game – but definitely try to play with a fight for four-player sweet spots in total (although it’s fun in the wild five to six player version and totally good with two or three).
Zachtronics listing image