Clients and Patrons

Clients and Patrons is a card game originating in the evolution of the Lost Retreat but adopted, refined and extensively played by Agents of the Stability Council who have introduced it to their contacts, allies and afiliates throughout the discontinuum.
The game may be played by anywhere from two to eight players, although a second deck is required when there are more than four players. A decent sized table is needed, since play depends on the layout of a large array of cards exposed to all players.
The deck is made up of one hundred and seventeen large format cards; six minor suits of thirteen cards with the remaining thirty nine cards being special emblematic major archana, strictly belonging to no single suit but each one preferentially associated with two of the minor suits. The six minor suits are hearts, eyes, stars, worms, crowns and daggers. Examples of some of the major arcana include 'The One Armed Man', represented by a Cyclops figure with a huge single foot like a mollusc and a single arm with the shoulder blade set in front of his neck (linked to eyes and worms), 'The Blob' a giant amoeba (linked to hearts and worms), 'Church Militant' depicted by a blood stained cross (linked to hearts and crowns) and the 'Cats in the Box' shown as a pair of twin black animals, one dead in the corner and the other with its paws raised and claws out to scratch any intruder (linked to eyes and stars).
Clients and Patrons is a complex game and it is beyond the scope of this article to detail all the rules but a flavour of the way play proceeds is described below.
After shuffling the cards, a tableau is dealt onto the table in the form of a five pointed star, each arm containing of four face down cards, alternately placed parallel and perpendicular to the line of the arm. Cards may be dealt to the players, one round at a time at any point during this process, until every player has seven cards. Different schools adopt slightly different dealing conventions, but the deal always concludes with a final ring of twenty four cards being placed face up in an outer ring round the centre and the remaining unused cards forming a draw pile at the centre of the star.
The object of the game is to construct a network of client cards and patron cards. Some of the cards are globally private until a declaration is called, others may be laid face down so that their identity is known only to one player, whilst the third category of cards are fully public. Ownership of cards in the tableau may shift according to the result of the exposure of hidden cards as well as the pattern of play.
Clients and Patrons to a large extent echoes within its structure of secrets, feints and spying the patterns of the power struggles played out within the discontinuum itself.