NÖBET: the second game at the table

FrostZero is not a single game. The play button in the main menu leads to two modes: SON SAYIM, the four to seven player social deduction table, and NÖBET, a classic shedding game for two to six players built on a thirty six card deck.

The NÖBET engine sits apart from the rest of the game. It has its own code folder, its own test assembly and its own bot behaviour. That keeps the two modes out of each other's way: a change on the SON SAYIM side does not break the NÖBET tests, and the other way round holds too.

The mode was renamed halfway through. A decision taken on 8 September aligned both mode names with the language of the station: NÖBET instead of the name the card game literature uses, and SON SAYIM for the main mode. The name of the game did not change, only the names of the two sittings at the table.

The rule summary is simple: there is no winner, only a loser. Each turn has one attacker and one defender. The defender either answers the incoming cards or takes all of them into hand. A player who runs out of cards is safe and leaves; the last player still holding cards takes the watch. There are two variants and the lobby decides which one is played.

NÖBET settled in a little more with every wave. Week seven brought a dealer seat to the table, week ten added a group gate, and week eleven fixed the table clearing at the end of a hand along with the new hand camera. On the guide side there is a separate twelve chapter volume with its own page specific drawings.

The online side uses the same network layer as SON SAYIM. In a verification run where three separate desktop processes played the same match, all three clients showed the same board at all one hundred and twelve decision points, with no mismatch at all.