And, poker game! Got the rules figured out. Interesting video Andrew recommended for research on auction varieties. I'll be back tomorrow with the game itself; this is just the setup of its rules and stuff. I'm sure I'll be able to squeeze a few thousand words out of the game itself, as I've written (copy/pastes into program with word count) 693 words just in overview. That's not even describing the rules and strategies of the individual poker variants I talk about!
EDIT: doing a bit more research, it turns out that it makes a lot more sense to have a full orbit, rotation around the table so that each person at the table gets to sit to the left of the dealer once, than to have it as just one hand of the game. Because that would represent a major lopsidedness if I get to bid first on stud hi-lo only one hand, while bidding last on the texas hold-'em. There are weird magical "individual player powers" at work, but I'm not sure if that balances everything out. 25 hands per table, with 50 hands played in the end? Or 5 hands, and only ten hands played in the end? I dunno yet. 50 hands seems like a lot, but it does give a lot of time for crunchy stuff to happen. So I'm leaning toward that.
Having the variant change every hand can make the game feel disjointed and lack flow. Players like the ability to get into a game and actually play a hand of the variation before it changes. Since you will fold most of the hands you'll be dealt, if only one hand of a variant is dealt, players may lose interest in the game.
There's not really a good way to rewrite the explanation right now without gutting a lot, and I really like this word count, so, eh. I'll fix it in post.
