Let Me Out

You want to get out of here, but people keep coming up with reasons for you to stay. Make excuses, or find a way to get it over with, but whatever you do, to win you have to let it end.

Everybody starts with at least a trivial excuse to leave, and a hand of arguments why someone trying to leave must stay. Excuses and arguments come in trivial, important, and cosmic levels. You can use a higher level argument to counter a lower level excuse, but you can't use a lower level argument, only equal or greater. Whenever you counter an excuse, you draw a card of your choice, either a guaranteed argument or a mixed deck that might give you argument or excuse. If anyone can play an excuse and not receive an argument from anyone, the game ends and they win. If any deck runs out of cards when somebody would draw, the game ends and nobody wins, because you were all trapped in the awkward situation way too long.

Setup:

There are 50 cards; print them out at poker deck size (2.5"w x 3.5"h). First shuffle the arguments, and deal 15 of them into a separate stack. Shuffle the excuses and deal each player 1. Then shuffle the remaining 35 cards into one stack together. Each player starts with 1 card from the argument-only stack, 1 guaranteed excuse, and 1 card from the mixed stack. Suitable for up to 4 players.