Mohur rules

Mohur is a two-player trading game played over a best of three rounds. Each round, both traders work the same five-card market, buying goods cheaply and selling them in bulk for tokens worth rupees.

Win a round by finishing it with more rupees than your rival, and you take a Company Seal. The first trader to two seals wins the match. A typical match runs 10 to 15 minutes, and each player has a 10-minute chess clock, so it cannot run away from you.

The deck is 55 cards: six kinds of goods, and coins.

Coins live in your coffer rather than your hand, do not count toward the seven-card hand limit, and exist to fuel large exchanges.

Each good has a stack of tokens, sorted high to low. When you sell, you take tokens off the top — so the first trader to sell a good takes the best of it, and whoever sells second takes what is left.

Thirty-eight tokens in total. If you sell more cards than there are tokens left, you take what remains — and the sale still counts toward a bonus.

Sell three or more cards at once and you draw a bonus token from the pile matching the size of the sale. There are three piles, shuffled separately at the start of each round, and a token is drawn at random rather than taken in order.

Bonus tokens stay face down until the round is scored, so neither trader knows exactly how far ahead they are.

If a pile is empty, no bonus is awarded for that sale.

• Shuffle all 55 cards and deal five to each trader.

• Any coins dealt to you move straight from your hand to your coffer.

• Place three coins face up in the market, then draw two cards from the deck — the market starts at exactly five cards.

• Sort the goods tokens into their stacks, highest on top, and shuffle each bonus pile separately.

• In the first round the starting trader is random. After that, whoever lost the previous round leads the next one.

On your turn you do exactly one thing: take cards, or sell cards. Never both, and never a part of each. The turn ends once that action has fully resolved.

Taking has three shapes, and you pick one of them.

An exchange cannot be one-for-one, and cannot take and return the same kind of good in the same action. After any take, your hand must be within the seven-good limit.

Pick one kind of good, discard one or more cards of it, and take that many tokens from its stack — highest value first.

Diamonds, gold and silver are the valuable goods, and cannot be sold as a single card: two or more, or not at all. Cloth, spice and leather can be sold one at a time. Coins are never sold.

Sell three or more cards in a single action and you also draw a bonus token. You may only sell one kind of good per turn.

You may hold at most seven goods. Coins sit in your coffer and do not count, so a full coffer never crowds your hand.

The limit is checked at the end of a take. Selling always reduces your hand, so it can never break it.

The round ends the moment one of two things becomes true, as soon as the action in progress has resolved: three or more goods token stacks are empty, or the deck is completely out of cards.

A market holding fewer than five cards is perfectly legal and play continues. The round does not end because the deck cannot refill the market to five — only when the deck is genuinely empty.

• Whoever holds strictly more coins takes the coin token, worth 5 rupees. On a tie, neither trader gets it.

• Both traders reveal their goods tokens and their hidden bonus tokens.

• Add up the rupees. The higher total takes the round and a Company Seal.

• If the totals tie, the trader with more bonus tokens wins the round; if that ties too, the one with more goods tokens.

The match ends the moment a trader holds two Company Seals. If neither does, everything is reset and a new round is dealt, led by whoever lost the last one.

Mohur is a game of partial information, and the line is worth knowing exactly.

• Taking coins and goods in the same action, or taking only some of the coins.

• Exchanging one card for one card, or taking and returning the same kind of good.

• Selling more than one kind of good at once.

• Selling a single diamond, gold or silver card.

• Finishing a take with more than seven goods in hand.