Kings in the Corner
Also known as Kings Corner, Kings Corners, King's Corner
- Players
- 2-6 players (best with 4)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed
- Time
- 15-30 minutes
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Category
- Shedding
Setup
Two to six can play. Three or four is the sweet spot. Six is the practical ceiling, because forty-two cards go out in the deal and four more form the layout, leaving a stock of just six. Use a standard 52-card deck with the jokers taken out. Aces are low. The ranking runs K-Q-J-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-A, and nothing can ever be played on an ace because there is no rank below it.
Pick a dealer any way you like and pass the deal to the left after each round. Everyone gets seven cards, dealt singly and clockwise. Put the remainder face down in the middle of the table as the stock.
Turn the top four cards of the stock face up and set them around the stock in a cross: one above, one below, one to the left, one to the right. Those four are the starting piles. The four diagonal positions between the arms of the cross stay empty. Those are the corners, and only a king may ever be placed in one.
A king turning up among those first four is allowed into a corner instead, and the benefit falls to the player on the dealer's left: on their turn they shift it across and fill the empty arm from their own hand. The same goes for a turned card that happens to fit straight onto another — first player moves it and replaces it from hand. Leaving a king where it landed is playable too, since a queen of the opposite colour goes on it either way.
Leave plenty of space around the cross. Piles grow outward as cards are added, and whole piles get picked up and relocated during play, so a cramped table gets confusing fast.
Play
The player to the dealer's left goes first and the turn passes clockwise.
Make as many plays as you can find, in whatever order you like, and then draw one card from the stock to close your turn. The draw comes last, which is worth fixing in your head: the card you pick up is never usable until your next turn, and going out means playing your final card and simply stopping, with no draw at all. Two things here are not settled between the published accounts — whether the draw may instead open the turn, and whether you must play when a play exists — and both are in the variants.
Four kinds of play are legal.
1. Play a card from your hand onto a pile. It must be one rank lower than that pile's exposed card and the opposite colour. A red 9 goes on a black 10; a black 4 goes on a red 5. You may run several cards from your hand onto the same pile in one turn as long as each one continues the alternating sequence.
2. Start a corner pile with a king. A king from your hand may be placed in any empty corner space, and that pile then builds down in alternating colours exactly like the others, beginning with a queen of the opposite colour. Because no rank outranks a king, a king can never be laid on top of another card at all; the only places one can go are a corner space or an empty arm of the cross.
3. Fill an empty arm of the cross. If one of the four original positions has been vacated, any card from your hand may be laid there to start a fresh pile, a king included, though most players save theirs for a corner. This applies only to the arms of the cross. An empty corner still requires a king.
4. Relocate a whole pile onto a different one. Look at the highest card of a pile, the one it started with. If that card is one rank lower and the opposite colour to the exposed card of some other pile, you may pick the whole pile up as a block and drop it on. A pile headed by a red 4 can go onto a pile whose exposed card is a black 5, taking everything below the 4 with it. You must move the pile intact; splitting it is not allowed. A pile headed by a queen can be dropped onto a corner king of the opposite colour in the same way, but a corner pile itself can never be moved, because nothing in the game accepts a king. The point of the move is usually the space it leaves behind, which becomes somewhere to dump an awkward card.
There is no limit on how many of these you combine in one turn, and consolidating piles to open spaces is the main source of long turns.
The round ends the instant a player puts down the last card from their hand. If the stock runs out first, play carries on without drawing; anyone who cannot or will not move simply passes. Once the stock is gone and the turn has gone all the way around with nobody playing a card, the round is dead and everyone scores what they are still holding.
Goal & scoring
You are trying to empty your hand. The first player to do it wins the round and scores nothing.
Everyone else counts the cards still in hand: 1 penalty point per card, except kings, which cost 10 each. One published scheme charges 2 for the other court cards, so agree it first. If the round ended in a stalemate with the stock exhausted and nobody out, every player scores their remaining cards the same way and no one takes the round.
Add the penalties across rounds and play to an agreed target; 25 or 50 is what both published accounts suggest. When any player crosses the target, the game stops and the lowest total wins; if two or more players are level on that lowest total, either share the win or deal one more round between them to settle it. A single deal scored on its own works perfectly well too.
The 10-point king penalty drives the tactics. A king never goes on top of anything, so the only way to shed one is into a corner or an empty arm of the cross; get one down as soon as a space opens, and think twice about filling the last corner yourself while you still hold another king.
Variants
Chip pot — The version sold in a box, and the usual gambling form. Everyone antes one chip before the deal. The winner of the round takes the pot, and losers pay in one chip per card left in hand plus ten for each king. Some groups also charge a chip whenever you end a turn without making any play at all, which pushes people to keep the layout moving.
Draw at the start of the turn — Draw your card first and then play, rather than playing and drawing to close. It sounds like a small rearrangement and it costs the table something real: with the draw at the end, drawing is the signal that your turn is over, and moving it to the front leaves nobody able to tell when you have finished. Groups that play this way need a spoken pass or a knock. Some go further and draw two cards a turn instead of one.
Compulsory play — One account makes it compulsory to play whenever you can, rather than holding cards back for a better moment; another leaves it entirely to you, which is the version the rules above assume. A narrower form applies only to kings — place one at your first opportunity or pay three points — though the source describing it also points out that the rule is close to unenforceable, since you can always claim to have just drawn the king, and recommends relying on the ten-point penalty for one caught in hand instead.
Bigger hands for two — With only two players some groups deal ten cards each instead of seven, or even thirteen, on the grounds that the seven-card deal leaves a very deep stock head to head and drags the round out. Two-handed play also has its own opening convention in one account: the non-dealer goes first rather than the player to the dealer's left, which amounts to the same seat and a different way of saying it.
Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Geeky Hobbies, Dice Game Depot, Official Game Rules, Denexa Games.