Area 52
Area 52 is one of 10 modern solitaire card games designed by Wil Su. All 10 games can be played with standard playing cards and are very well documented by Wil Su in a free-to-download document. If you have any comments or feedbacks on Area 52 (or any of the other games in the document), the best place to reach Wil is the One Player Guild thread on BoardGameGeek.com.
Overview
To repel an alien invasion, you must lead a team of elite soldiers. The aliens will launch two waves of attacks. The second wave will be stronger and more brutal than the first. To win the game, you need to successfully repel both waves without running out of resources. It's crucial to maintain a diverse and well-dispersed defense force to effectively fend off the intruders.
Setup
The game is played with a standard deck of playing cards with no jokers.
The red cards are shuffled together and placed face down in the Aliens pile to form the first wave.
The black cards are shuffled together and placed face down in the Defenders pile.
The game starts with 3 aliens revealed and 6 defenders drawn from the Defenders pile.
Aces (A) are worth 1, while Jacks (J), Queens (Q) and Kings (K) are worth 11, 12, and 13 respectively.
Rules
The game is played over a series of turns. Each turn, three new aliens are revealed, to be defeated (or avoided) one at a time. The card on top is always the current attacker.
One at a time, in order, choose to engage the current attacker via either a dual attack, a single attack, or a sacrifice.
Dual Attack
Choose two defenders whose sum adds up exactly to the attacker’s value. The attacker gets discarded, and any defender that matches the attacker's color is also discarded. Fallen defenders get replaced by drawing from the defenders pile.
Single Attack
Choose a defender with a greater value and opposite color from the attacker. Your defender gets discarded and replaced with the attacker. Your soldier was hurt in the fight, it now has a lower value.
Sacrifice
If you cannot or do not want to defeat the invader via an attack, choose a defender and sacrifice it. The defender gets discarded and the current attacker gets moved to the back of the alien deck face down. Another defender is drawed to replace the sacrificed defender.
Second Wave
Once you’ve defeated all cards in the Aliens deck, the discard pile is shuffled and moved to form a second wave of attack. Remember that all cards are discarded to the same pile, including defenders! The second wave will therefore have a greater number of aliens, having both black and red cards.
Game End
If you run out of defenders on the board, you lose the game. Your score is negative of the number of cards left in the alien deck, including all face-up attackers. If you’re somehow still on the first wave. 50 is substracted from the score.