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Violet and the Grumpy Nisse is the asymmetric two-player card game by Pedro Pereira, published by Agie Games in 2022 with art by Karina Duncan. One player is Violet, a girl crossing the night forest by lantern light to reach Ordep the troll's fire. The other is Torech, the nisse who wants her lost. This is the free browser version: play either side against an AI trained by self-play and sharpened with tree search, or against a friend online.
The deck holds 36 cards: values 1 to 9 in four colours — lake, forest, mountain and crystal — one for each area of the forest. Each turn both players play one card; there is no following suit and nothing in hand is ever illegal. The colour of the area Violet stands in is trump: a card of the led colour is beaten only by a higher card of the same colour or by a trump, and on a neutral space the first card played simply wins. The wild 5 always counts as the area colour, so there are twelve trumps to count.
When Violet wins the trick she chooses: advance one space and burn one unit of fuel, or stay and refill three. When Torech wins she must advance anyway and loses two, and the two cards go to his fear slots — the second pair pushed off moves the Fear Pawn by the difference between the values, plus a penalty once the lantern runs low. Violet wins on reaching Ordep's fire at the end of the 19-space track. Torech wins if the lantern burns out first, or if the fear catches her.
Every value from 1 to 7 does something: the 1 beats any 9, the 2 and 3 dig into the deck, the 4 swaps with the discard pile, the 6 shields itself against trump, the 7 makes the opponent show their hand. Torech drafts three of ten event tiles — the Faery Ring, Off Track, the Scent of Fear, a Trick up the Sleeve — and springs them as the fear advances. Four advantage tokens, one per area, go to whoever handles the area better and buy a fresh market of four cards, before or after a draw.
Card counting decides games: both players see the discard pile and the market, so a trump 6 that only a 7, 8 or 9 of its colour can beat is a different card once those are gone. Violet tends to win the long games, so she paces herself and refills where a token has already gone to Torech, resting several times where it costs nothing extra. Torech wants it short: drain the lantern early, and let the +1 and +2 fear zones do the rest.
Full rules, card by card and tile by tile · Auf Deutsch spielen
Violet and the Grumpy Nisse © Agie Games · designed by Pedro Pereira · art by Karina Duncan. This is a fan adaptation; support the publisher at agiegames.com.