Rules

Time For Some Serious Slacking

It takes significant effort to avoid this much work. Your goal is to amass the most slacker points by building inspired slacker sets.

So, What’s A Set?

There are five types of cards in Four Day Weekend:

• Excuses: why your boss thinks you’re not at work today. Excuse cards have green backgrounds.)
• Activities: what you’re actually doing while not working. (Red, yellow, and blue backgrounds with a white banner on the left side.)
• Necessities: how you’re getting by while not working. The four types of Necessities are Food , Transportation, Shelter, and Cash. (Red, yellow, and blue backgrounds with a black banner on the left side.)
• Bonuses: extras you’ve earned through hard work lucked into. (Black backgrounds.)

A scoring set consists of one Excuse, one Activity, and one to four Necessities.

• A set may contain only one of each Necessity type.
• A set may include one Bonus card.

A Bit About Sets

Start a set by placing an Excuse card face-up on the table. Your next card in the set must be an Activity or Bonus. Once your set has an Activity, you can add Necessity cards.

Cards may not be removed from a set once played.

A set is locked when you lay down another Excuse card to start your next set. You can’t add any more cards to the locked set. Slackers don’t multi-task.

Get The Slacking Started

A full game consists of one round per slacker. If there are only two or three of you, play two rounds per slacker.

A different slacker should go first in each round, and play proceeds clockwise. The game winner is the slacker with the most points accumulated through all rounds.

Starting A Round

Shuffle the cards, and deal five cards to each slacker. The remaining cards are placed in faced down in the center of the table. This is the Draw pile.

Taking A Turn

If there are any cards in your Personal Discard row, sweep them into the central Really Discarded pile. (On your first turn you won’t have a Personal Discard row. Keep reading to find out where that row comes from.)

You should have anywhere from zero to five cards in your hand. Choose which cards you DON’T want, and place those face-up, in a row, toward the center of the table. This is your Personal Discard pile.

Next, replenish your hand to five cards. You may select these cards from the Draw pile or from any other player’s Personal Discard pile.

• Your five cards can come in any combination from the Draw pile and the other slackers’ Personal Discard piles.
• You may draw cards one at a time. For eample, if you start with two cards in your hand, you can take a card from the Draw pile, see that it works well with a card from another slacker’s Discard, claim that card, then take the third card from the Draw pile.

Now that you have five cards in your hand, it’s time to do some set work.

• If you don’t have an active set, start one by playing an Excuse card.
• If you do have an active set, add to it with as many cards as you like from your hand. (Adhering to set composition rules, of course.)
• You may add cards to a set, then start a new set with another Excuse card. Remember, once you start a new set, you can’t add cards to a previous set.

A few other rules to remember about sets:

• A set can include only one Necessity of each type.
• A set can only include a single Bonus card.

Back To Work-Ish

Once there are three locked sets in play, any slacker may end the round by declaring Back To Work-ish.

You can declare Back To Work-ish at any point during your turn. However, if you declare Back To Work-ish after sweeping your Personal Discard row, you must replenish your hand to five cards from the Draw pile.

After Back To Work-ish is declared, at the end of each player’s turn all cards remaning in his/her hand are placed in the Personal Discard row. (Including the slacker who sent these poor souls Back To Work-ish.)

When Back To Work-ish is declared, all other slackers get one final turn, then the points are totaled.

Scoring

Remember, you only get points for sets that include an Excuse, an Activity, and at least one Necessity.

Each Activity and Necessity card has a point value ranging from 1 to 3. Add them up, including these multipliers and bonuses.

• First, if the color of a Necessity card matches the color wheel to the left of the Activity card’s title, double that Necessity’s points.
• Next, follow the instructions on any Bonus card.

For example, assume you have a two-point, red Cash Necessity in a set with an Activity card that doubles red Necessities. The Cash card is now worth four points. If you also have a Bonus card that triples Cash points, you’ve lucked your way into a massive twelve points for this combination. That’s some serious slacking.