A: Choose A New Rule says:

“Look through the draw and discard piles for a New Rule card of your choice and play it. Reshuffle the discard pile into the draw pile. (Don’t shuffle this card in – use it to start the new discard pile.)”

The New Rule you just chose is not getting discarded. You pulled it and put it into play. It’s in the middle of the table with the rest of the New Rules. The Goal is out there (if there’s a Goal). People have Keepers in play too. None of these cards in play are going anywhere.

After you use the card Choose A New Rule, however, it would normally go into the discard pile, which you are instructed to reshuffle into the draw pile. But we don’t want the card Choose A New Rule to potentially come right back up again too soon, just by chance, so we want you to leave that card out of the reshuffle, and use it to start the new discard pile.

I think the confusion comes from the reference to “this card” which might have been interpreted to be the New Rule you picked, rather than “this card” which you’re using and reading right now, i.e. Choose A New Rule.

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A: Yes! The Fruit Tree, Pine Tree, or Palm Tree all count as The Tree in Family Fluxx, or as Trees in EcoFluxx / Nature Fluxx.

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Do I get to decide who gets what? Do I get to decide how many to deal to each player? Do the recipients put them in their hands or on the table in front of them? Are they face up or face down? When I’m dealing them out, who do I start with?

A: First of all, only for Everybody Gets 1 (or Dreams & Omens) does the active player get to look at and decide who gets what. That’s a very different situation that the ones we’re talking about here. This question focuses on random (fairly even) redistribution along the lines of Share The Wealth.

The cards in question are shuffled or otherwise randomized so that the dealer does not know what’s being given out. They are then dealt out evenly, going around the circle clockwise, one card to each player in turn, continuing until the cards are all gone. Dealing starts with either the active player or the player to their left, with the intention of providing any possible benefit to the active player.

• So if it’s for Keepers, or a mixture of Keepers and Creepers, the active player should get the first card, because this is felt to be to their advantage, so they won’t get shorted if the number doesn’t deal out evenly. However, we would consider it an officially sanctioned house-rule if your group wanted to give the active player the option of starting with the player to their left instead of themselves. There could be reasons…

• For redistribution of Creepers-only, the card will usually say to start with the player to the left of the active player, because Creepers are generally considered a disadvantage, and this would mean that if anyone was going to receive fewer, it would always be the active player. However, as with other redistribution cards, your group may choose to let the active player decide whether they want to start with themselves or the person on their left. Again, we can think of reasons why someone might want to start distributing Creepers to themselves first.

Once dealt, all cards will be put into play immediately, so it’s OK to deal them out face up, but it’s sometimes better to deal them out face down, then have everybody reveal what they got all at once. As mentioned above, re/distributing by dealing will cause all players to end up with roughly equal numbers of cards. So if there are large discrepancies in the number of cards players had in play, this will even them out: players with a lot more than other players will end up with fewer than they had, and players with few or zero cards in play may end up with more. That’s the way it goes.

Here’s a list of redistributing cards, and their types:

Scramble Keepers, which is only in early versions of “Basic” Fluxx (1.0-3.x) is the only Action which is different. While you still shuffle up the Keepers and hand them back randomly and they go back into play, you don’t deal them out evenly, but instead give each player the same number of Keepers they had before. When we came up with Share The Wealth, we felt it was far superior, as we liked the way it leveled the playing field, keeping the game more competitive, to maximize player engagement.

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The card reads, in part “You decide who gets what.” My brother thinks I should hand them out without looking at them, but I think I get to look at them so that I know what they all got, but they only know what they each got.

A: As you have surmised, there is indeed no meaning to the phrase “you decide who gets what” unless you get to look at all the cards before you hand them out (yes, the intention is that you hand them out face down so that each person only knows what they themselves got).

Many people’s first instinct upon seeing someone else play this card is to simply reach forward and draw from the deck themselves, as if it were indeed intended to be random, but most, upon a careful reading of the card, come to the correct conclusion.

Since we have plenty of room on this card, we started implementing clearer text on this card in 2016:
“You look at the cards and decide who gets what, dealing them out face down to each player.”

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If it’s not, the same card could get passed all the way around the circle until it’s back with the person who played the Action.

A: Yes. Everyone is supposed to pick a card from their hand, and pass it simultaneously, specifically to prevent a single card being passed around.

For example, what would happen if only one person had a hand? If the card pass happened sequentially, there would be no change in anyone’s hand! (And how do you decide who starts?) What actually happens is that the person with a hand passes a card, and everyone else passes nothing, since their hands are empty.

A good rule of thumb is: when in doubt, assume that things in Fluxx happen simultaneously.

See also: We think we broke the game…

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