As I see it, what to do if you encounter this scenario hinges upon how you interpret rules infractions of two rules in the rulebook:

(1) “Whenever either player cannot play a card, the game ends immediately.”
(2) “When you play the Jester, you must choose a value for him between 1 and 10.”
For the first rule, let’s say that your hand consists of a 4,5,8,9 when you draw your final card, 2. On the next turn, if you try to play the 5 (in violation of the rules), you would be forced to return that card to your hand and try again. If you continued to try to play the high cards, the other player would continue to correct you until finally you play the only card that is left in your hand that you can play. What is important to understand here is that if you violate the rules, you must take back your action – the violation does not forfeit your action. You still must play a card. It is only when you cannot play a card that the game ends, meaning that it is impossible within the rules for you to play any card in your hand.

For the second rule, let’s say that you try to declare the jester as value = 11 when you play it. Once again, this would violate the rules and you would be forced to take back your action and try again. The same thing goes for any non-integer value of the jester or any value less than 1. However, being forced to try again invalidates neither the rule that says that you have to play a card on your turn nor the possibility of playing the jester again (with an acceptable value).

From these two (meta-game) considerations which explain what to do when someone violates the rules of the game, it becomes clear that Nolin’s interpretation of what to do in this particular scenario is correct. The player will be forced to continue to try to play the jester until the jester’s value = 1. Until that point, he still CAN play a card, even if takes many ‘take backs’ to do so.

This question raises some interesting points nonetheless about this game and game design in general. I really appreciate being forced to think about it and come up with a clarification for a number of reasons.

First, I did not anticipate that anyone would undercut the value of the jester. In designing the game, it seemed to be categorically better to be able to play the last card, and thus use the maximum value of the jester when it is drawn. It is clear to me now, however, that there are certain scenarios where if the jester is used to reduce the remaining turns of the opponent from 2 to 1, then that small difference may still be enough to turn potential defeat into victory. As a result, I am happy to see the jester being used creatively and advantageously in a way that I did not anticipate, and equally sad to have to say that it is not legal to do so.

Second, the answer to this rules question touches upon an element of game design which is often taken for granted. Rarely do I consider what players should do if someone violates the rules. The goal in designing any game is to provide mechanisms for verification which make it possible for the other players to correct any violation of the rules, intentional or not, when it occurs and to provide incentives for players to operate within the rules so that breaking them poses a strategic disadvantage. But, few rulebooks actually specify what you do if one of the rules is violated.

My thoughts on this situation are that the play should be corrected in such a way that no other rules are broken. In this case, it usually involves invalidating the play, retracting it, returning any parts of the game state to the way they were before the play and forcing the player to play again. Under the premise that revealing information about what you can do in a game is almost always strategically disadvantageous, this seems to be sufficient punishment to induce remembering the rules and in most cases does not adversely affect the other players.

There are, however, situations where violations of the rules only manifest at a point where other people have already been forced to reveal additional information about their capacities. In such a situation, it is not always possible to fairly return the game state to the point of infraction – the rules violator may in fact be in a better situation by doing so. I think most people call this SHENANIGANS, and often times it is cause for quite a bit of acrimony and the premature end of a game. Needless to say, this is something a game designer tries to avoid. But ultimately, it is impossible to avoid. As a game does not exist without its rules, and people who follow them, there will always be ways to gain advantage by acting outside of them.