In Business Cards, each player takes on the role of an employee of a struggling company. The branch is going to go through some significant downsizing and can only keep one employee on board. This can be accomplished through hard work, brown nosing the boss, sabotaging co-workers, or a combination of the three.
Each player starts out with three Idea cards which can be played for points or effects, and three Supplies cards which can be used to play Idea cards. The object of the game is to collect more points than your co-workers by the end of the game.
Each Idea card consists of an Employee side with an effect, a cost, and a point value; and a Boss side which contains a Boss effect. During a turn, an employee can take two actions. These actions may include playing an Idea card with Supplies card, discarding an Idea card to gain two more Supplies cards, or drawing a new Ideas card from the deck.
After each round of game play, however, the Boss decides to complicate things with an idea of his own. This is done by drawing an Idea card from the top of the deck. The Boss side action is then used as an effect for the subsequent round of game play. After the Boss action is applied to the new round, the boss moves to the right, and the player who started the last round begins the new round. The game ends when the Boss runs out of ideas (when an Idea card can no longer be drawn during the Boss's turn.)