Reserved Parking Guide

Beginner

How to play

Reserved Parking

Fill your hand with face cards using your discards
Play as many high cards as you can (make sure you don’t get out to early)
Get out of the blind with your final hand, leaving as many faces in your hand as possible

Often in ante 1, you’ll have no scoring joker to help you beat the blind with. In this case it's better to play a flush/straight/full house early, getting closer to the score requirement. This way you can use the rest of your hands & discards to get parking value, and then get out on the last hand using a drawn full house of faces.

Picking up a tarot that can help you get out in 1 on the last hand is always worth it to get more parking value ( for flush house, , , )

Value in deck

When your deck has enough value (, , etc.), it's usually better to dig for those over getting maximum value from Parking.

Midas mask

If you have , you want to turn all your face cards into gold as soon as possible. It’s completely fine to miss out on reserved parking value to speed up this process, as it will earn you more money in the long run. Optimally, you strike a balance where you only play 5-6 face cards to make solid progress on turning everything gold, while still getring some parking value.

Intermediate

Synergy (econ)

Oops all 6’s

Double the money! And actually better than double the money if you have red seals or mime (because the ‘bug’ cannot happen if it hits 100% of the time).

Burglar

More hands, more value? Kinda… You lose all your discards, so the first couple hands are usually spent on drawing the face cards you’d normally draw using your discards. becomes a lot better when you can copy the effect with a /, or if you have other econ jokers that benefit from the extra hands (, Let’s go Gambling).

Mime

More money! But not as much as you think. Beware of the parking mime bug and don’t expect your triple mime setup to print you lots of money here.

Juggler / Bean / Troubadour

More handsize = more face cards in hand = more money.

Be careful with however, as going from 4 -> 3 hands will actually earn you less money per blind. Once you have 5 hands (down to 4 after troubadour) it’s usually worth it though… unless you have trouble drawing enough face cards using just your discards; the extra hand size only matters if you can fill it up with face cards.

Business card

On paper, and Reserved Parking have anti-synergy, but usually it’s quite nice to have both in slot. More often than not, you are playing face cards on the last hand to beat the blind, where Business Card will earn you some extra money.

As the game progresses, your deck will start containing more value, and holding on to the first face cards you find becomes less valuable than digging for value in your deck. Again, quite nice to have Business Card in this spot to get money when you dump face cards to dig.

Playing a face card with Business Card is twice the money of holding it for that hand. Thus it’s optimal to play face cards on your second to last hand, allowing you to redraw into more face cards, and on the last hand.

By holding both, you are also hedging for the better econ later in the game. If retriggers show up you play into Business Card, if Burglar / Mime / Baron show up you’ll probably get more money from parking.

Synergy (scoring)

Some scoring setups are more compatible with reserved parking than others.

Face card builds

Holding your face cards till the last hand is very easy if you can use them to get out of the blind on the last hand.

Conversely, if you’re playing a build that needs numbered cards to get out of the blind (, , ), you will have a much harder time getting value.

Conditional Mult / Chips

Chips & mult are great scoring, but be careful of having too much scoring, and not being able to play all your hands before beating the blind.

The sweet spot is to have the scoring locked behind a condition, jokers like , etc. usually feel great to play with Reserved Parking, as you can just avoid triggering these jokers until the last hand.

While it may not seem like it, is also a conditional scoring joker. By holding a low numbered card in your hand, you can minimize your scoring until the last hand.

High card builds

While high card builds are quite nice to play with Reserved Parking, you often have to do quite a lot of micro to make it work.

Holding all your face cards and playing high cards will get you out of the blind wayyy too fast if you’re not careful. You can play pairs to score less, or play some steel/queens/kings to reduce scoring. Make sure you can still beat the blind after throwing away these cards!

When to pivot

Better econ options

Parking is a mediocre econ joker when you only have 4 hands, and don’t get help from Mime/Dice. Usually you can get more money from other econ options if available.

Since Reserved Parking requires you to forego digging in your deck, econ jokers like , , become a lot more favorable to play, allowing you to dig 5 cards every hand/discard.

Anti-synergy

If you’re playing a build, you’ll have a rough time getting value from parking. Replace it with a different econ joker ASAP.

also makes parking quite useless.

Advanced

Parking Mime bug

The way retriggers are coded makes behave a little strangely. The community often refers to this as the Parking Mime Bug, but beware that this ‘bug’ applies to both AND .

Explanation:

Cards in your hand can get triggered by various effects while playing the blind:

Retriggers from or are coded in such a way that the additional retrigger only happens if there was a successful trigger before it.

This means that when a card in your hand misses the ½ and fails to proc Reserved Parking, the game does not attempt to retrigger this card, regardless of how many retrigger effects (mime, red seal) you have.

You don’t necessarily need to mitigate this. If the face cards have a trigger effect secondary to parking (STM, steel, baron…), parking will always get a chance to proc on retrigger.

Raw: Expected value & Optimal Copy Setup

Raw = no Dice, and no secondary retrigger effects (steel, STM, baron, fist).

Calculating the Expected Value for a face card in your hand can be done using the following formula:

P = # copies of parking
R = # number of triggers (=1 if no mime or red seal)

q = 1 − 0.5^P (= the chance that a single trigger happens)

EV = (P/2) × (1 + q + q² + … + q^(R−1)) = (P/2) × (1 − q^R) / (1 − q)
   = P · 2^(P−1) · (1 − (1 − 0.5^P)^R)

If you have parking mime and 2 copy jokers, the optimal way to arrange the copies is to copy parking twice.

Double copy parking gives $2.81 EV per face card
1 copy each give slightly less: $2.31 EV per face card

If you have more than 2 copy jokers, you want to balance the copies, copying parking an extra time if you have an odd number of copy jokers.

This table shows the expected value per face card per hand.

Expected value (Raw)
# Triggers ↓ / # Copies of Parking →	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
1	0.50	1.00	1.50	2.00	2.50	3.00	3.50
2	0.75	1.75	2.81	3.88	4.92	5.95	6.97
3	0.88	2.31	3.96	5.63	7.27	8.86	10.42
4	0.94	2.73	4.97	7.28	9.54	11.72	13.84
5	0.97	3.05	5.85	8.83	11.74	14.54	17.23
6	0.98	3.29	6.61	10.27	13.88	17.31	20.59
7	0.99	3.47	7.29	11.63	15.94	20.04	23.93

ƒx P * 2^(P-1) * (1 - (1 - 0.5^P)^R)

Dice: Expected value & Optimal Copy Setup

The expected value with is very easy to calculate, it’s simply the number of times the face card triggers.

Evidently the optimal copy setup is balancing the amount of triggers and on trigger effects.

Force retrigger: Expected value & Optimal Copy Setup

If the face card is forcefully retriggered due to steel, STM, Baron or Raised Fist, the expected value is $0.5 * #triggers

Again the optimal copy setup is balancing the amount of triggers and on trigger effects.

Reserved Parking money calculator

Setup mode# copies of parking P# number of triggers RFace cards held FHands played while holding them H

EV per face card, per hand

$0.50

EV per blind

$7.50

Reserved Parking Guide

How to play