When I’m dealing them out, who do I start with? Are they face up or face down? Do the recipients put them in their hands or on the table in front of them?

A: This question addresses situations where you’re mixing up and redistributing cards in play, either Keepers, Creepers, or a mix of the two. After being redistributed, they remain in play (i.e. they do not go into players’ hands).

They 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, if your group wants to, feel free to implement a house-rule that the active player gets to decide whether to start with the person on their left or themselves.

• 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. Again, feel free to implement a house rule giving the active player the option of starting with the person on their left or themselves.

The cards thus distributed are considered to all come into play simultaneously. This means that win conditions are not checked until after all cards have been dealt out – one can’t achieve victory in the middle of card distribution. If people have difficulty with this concept, you can deal them out face down, then have everybody reveal what they got all at once, as long as nobody gets confused and puts these in their hand.

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.

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 precursor to Share the Wealth. While that Action also has you shuffle up the Keepers and redistribute them randomly back into play again, they weren’t dealt out evenly. Instead each player received the same number of Keepers they had before. When Andy 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 and maximizing player engagement. Scramble Keepers was retired, replaced by Share the Wealth for all subsequent versions.