If you sat down to design a game about Jack and the Beanstalk, it seems inevitable that it’ll be an asymmetric contes...

If you sat down to design a game about Jack and the Beanstalk, it seems inevitable that it’ll be an asymmetric contest between quick and nimble Jack (from an unrelated nursery rhyme) and the powerful and ponderous giant. If it must be a tableau manipulation game as well there’s no doubt the end result will be something along the lines of The Blood of an Englishman. If you’ve played solitaire (including more obscure variations), you’ve moved cards around in a tableau. Often the rules restrict you to moving the cards in the front and your goal is to dig out the next card in a sequence in order to build up stacks (foundations) next to the tableau. This is what Jack does in The Blood of an Englishman, though the numbers need not be sequential, just increasing. Thematically, he’s climbing the beanstalk (numbered cards which have increasingly ominous images of vines) to get to a treasure (gold, goose or harp). Claiming all three treasures would require 21 cards and Jack can make three moves…