More Exclamation Cards for Suspense

I was fortunate enough to play Suspense a few more times with southern gentleman gamer Jonathan Bolding. Together we brainstormed a handful of new exclamation cards to add to the basic Suspense deck for further replay value. In the base game, you just shuffle the whole deck and deal it out to each player until only the thirteenth card is left as the secret card. Out of the thirteen cards, only one isn't a number: the exclamation, which currently says "Lowest Sum of Numbers in Play."

With some simple permutations, we came up with a bunch of different exclamation cards.

• Lowest Sum of Numbers in Play
• Lowest Sum of Numbers in Hand
• Highest Sum of Numbers in Play
• Highest Sum of Numbers in Hand
• Lowest Black Sum of Numbers in Play
• Lowest Black Sum of Numbers in Hand
• Highest Black Sum of Numbers in Play
• Highest Black Sum of Numbers in Hand
• Lowest White Sum of Numbers in Play
• Lowest White Sum of Numbers in Hand
• Highest White Sum of Numbers in Play
• Highest White Sum of Numbers in Hand
• Fewest Cards in Play
• Fewest Cards in Hand
• Most Cards in Play
• Most Cards in Hand
• Sum in Play Closest to 6 without being over
• Sum in Hand Closest to 6 without being over
• Sum in Play Closest to 6 without being under
• Sum in Hand Closest to 6 without being under

That's twenty different cards total. Now, one of the appeals of Suspense as a microgame is that it doesn't have a lot of cards. There is almost a fetishistic appeal in that minimalism.

If I were reluctant to add 20 cards to this deck, I'd just add one card that has all of these permutations listed on it. I'd remove the victory condition from the exclamation card so it's just a blank placeholder. Then before each round, you roll a d20 to determine what the exclamation card represents this round.

But I'm not that reluctant to add more cards to the deck. In production terms, the cost-difference between a thirteen card game and a thirty-two card game is pretty slim. We'll see how that turns out!