Nertz
Also known as Nerts, Pounce, Racing Demon, Peanuts, Squeal
- Players
- 2-8 players (best with 4)
- Deck
- One standard 52-card deck per player, each with a different back design; jokers removed
- Time
- 30-60 minutes
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Category
- Shedding
Setup
Every player needs a full 52-card deck of their own with the jokers out, and the backs must be visibly different from one another. That is not a nicety: everybody's cards end up jumbled together in the centre, and at the end of each round you sort them out again by back design in order to score. Matching packs make a round unscoreable.
You also need a table everyone can reach across at once, which is the real limit on how many can play. One account rates it a very good game for two and a fun one for three or four, and reckons that at five playing as individuals it starts to get out of hand; from an even six upwards you want the partnership game described below.
Everyone shuffles their own deck and builds an identical layout in front of themselves, at the same time:
- Build a pile of thirteen on your right, all face down, then turn its top card over. This is your Nertz pile, and emptying it is the object of the game.
- Deal four cards face up in a row beside it, side by side and not overlapping. These are your work piles, one card deep to begin with.
- The remaining thirty-five cards are your stock. Keep them face down; most players hold them in one hand.
The centre of the table stays bare. Foundations are never dealt — they appear during play as aces are put out, and they belong to everybody. Arrange yourselves so that every player can reach that middle ground easily.
When every player says they are set, somebody counts down and the whole table starts on the same word. There is no dealer, no first player and no turn order at any point.
Play
Nobody takes turns. Everybody plays simultaneously and at whatever speed they can sustain. You are never obliged to play a card either: waiting is always allowed if a move does not suit you.
THE CENTRE
An ace played into the middle starts a foundation, and it may come from anywhere: the face-up card of your Nertz pile, the exposed card of a work pile, or the top of your waste. Foundations build upward in suit, ace through king, one card at a time, and any card you can legally place may likewise come off a work pile, your waste or your Nertz pile.
There is no fixed number of foundations and no one-per-suit rule. Every ace that appears starts a foundation of its own, and since there is a whole deck per player, four separate spade foundations can be running side by side at different heights. That is why the centre sprawls, and why a card you cannot place now may fit a moment later.
Foundations are common property — you play onto other people's aces exactly as freely as onto your own. A foundation that reaches its king is finished, so turn it over or push it aside to keep the middle readable. Cards played to the centre never come back to anyone.
YOUR OWN SIDE
The four work piles build downward in alternating colours, red on black and black on red, overlapped so that everything underneath the exposed card stays readable. You may shift the exposed card of a work pile onto another work pile that continues the sequence, and anything sitting on top of it travels with it. Clear a work pile out and the space is yours to fill from the top of your Nertz pile, the top of your waste, or another work pile.
While a space is open there is a shortcut worth knowing. Instead of laying a card into the space and then rebuilding on top of it, you may slide that card straight underneath an existing work pile, provided it ranks one higher than the card at that pile's head — the highest one, which the rest of the pile descends from — and is the opposite colour. A black queen goes under a pile headed by a red jack in one movement rather than three.
THE NERTZ PILE
Only the face-up card on top is live. It can go to a foundation, onto a work pile that takes it, or into an empty work-pile space, and the moment it leaves you turn the next card up. The standard beginner's error is to play beautiful solitaire on the work piles and forget that only this pile ends the round.
THE STOCK
Turn cards off the stock three at a time, face up, into a waste pile beside it, keeping them in the order they came. Only the top card of that waste is live, and it may go to a foundation or onto one of your work piles; play it and the card beneath it becomes the live one, and you may keep playing down into the waste as long as the cards keep going somewhere. When the stock is down to its last card or two, put those onto the waste and then turn the whole waste over to make a fresh stock. What you may not do is lift the waste and slip it underneath so that the deal of three comes out somewhere else.
That restriction matters. Two cards in every three stay buried, and which ones they are is fixed by how many cards the pile holds, so cycling a stock you have taken nothing from brings the identical cards up in the identical places however many times you go round. Playing a single card off the waste is what shifts the count and re-groups everything behind it.
There is one sanctioned way out of a stock that has closed on you, and you have to wait for it. When every player is stuck, or nobody wishes to play on, everybody re-forms their stock from their waste and then moves its top card to the bottom, which re-groups every triple behind it. If you are stuck while somebody else can still move, you wait: you may not rotate your own stock until the whole table has come to a halt.
THE ETIQUETTE THAT KEEPS IT HONEST
One hand only. You may switch hands but never use both at once, though the hand holding your stock does not count. Move a single card at a time into the centre and let go of it before reaching for the next; a block of cards moving between your own work piles is the one exception. Nobody touches anybody else's layout for any reason, and nothing comes back out of the middle.
Collisions in the middle are constant, and they settle themselves without adjudication: whichever of the two cards ended up underneath got there first, so that is the one that counts. Whoever played the loser simply retrieves it, restores it to the pile it left, and plays on. Nothing is forfeited and nobody owes anybody anything. When a collision genuinely cannot be called either way, both cards stay where they landed.
ENDING IT
A player whose Nertz pile is empty may call "Nertz", and everything stops on the word — hands off the cards mid-reach, though a card already travelling may finish its journey. The call is not compulsory the instant the pile clears, and this is the most under-used decision in the game: you may carry on playing to build your score and call when it suits you. Every extra card is another point, and every second you take is another second for somebody else.
A round can also end the other way. Occasionally every player gets stuck at once and the stock rotation above frees nothing for anybody. When there is no move left anywhere on the table, the round is finished with no Nertz called, and it is scored exactly as normal — cards in the middle still count and cards still in Nertz piles are still penalised, with nobody taking a call bonus.
Goal & scoring
Two things pay. Emptying your Nertz pile lets you end the round and cut everyone else off from scoring anything further, and every card you get into the middle scores while the round lasts. Those two aims pull against each other, which is the whole game.
When play stops, break the centre foundations apart and sort the cards by back design so that each player gets back exactly the cards they played. Count them: 1 point for each card of yours that reached the middle. Then count whatever is left in your Nertz pile and subtract 2 for each of those. A player who never got going can finish a round well down into the minus figures, and negative round scores are completely normal.
A bonus for whoever called is common but not universal, and the two published accounts do not price it alike: one puts it at 10 points and the other at 25. Plenty of tables play the bare arithmetic and no bonus at all. Settle it before the first round, because it decides how hard you should chase the call rather than quietly feeding foundations while somebody else races.
Rounds repeat until somebody reaches or passes an agreed target, 100 being the usual figure. One account then settles the match by margin rather than by placing — the winner takes from each of the others in proportion to the gap between their scores — which makes every point worth having rather than only the top spot. Between rounds each player reclaims their own deck and should count it, since a stray card with somebody else's back in your pile is the standard way the next round goes wrong.
The tension is worth stating plainly. A card played from your stock scores exactly the same as a card played off your Nertz pile, so pure point-scoring says play whatever is available. But only the Nertz pile lets you end the round, and whoever ends it decides how much time everybody else gets. Play wide and you score more per round while handing the timing to an opponent; go straight at the Nertz pile and you take the bonus and the clock, but you will have left cards unplayed that were worth a point each.
Variants
Partnership Nertz — Once the table is past five, this is the answer, and it wants an even number of players so that everybody has a partner. A pair counts as one player throughout: both published accounts have them sharing a single layout — one Nertz pile, four work piles and one stock between the two of them, not one each — and scoring exactly as a solo player would, off a pack whose back nobody else at the table is using. The two sit side by side. What the arrangement buys is four hands over one tableau, and the usual division of labour puts the Nertz pile in one partner's charge while the other turns the stock.
Racing Demon and the other names — The same game travels under several names. One account has it beginning as Racing Demon, in 1890s England, which is still what it is called in Britain; it is recorded there through the 1920s and 1930s and turns up in American publications from 1934 as Pounce, with Nertz the later American name. Peanuts, Squeal, Scrooge and Racing Canfield are all recorded too. That history is not universally accepted — the American association devoted to the game says it knows of no inventor and no date of creation, and puts the game only as far back as the 1940s. The layout is the same under every name: a pile of thirteen, four work piles, shared foundations from aces. What differs is scoring convention and small details like whether the stock turns one card or three.
Shorter Nertz pile — Deal twelve cards to the Nertz pile instead of thirteen, or eleven; either way all but the last go face down and the top one is turned up. Rounds finish noticeably sooner, which suits a crowded table where the centre fills fast anyway, and it takes some of the sting out of the penalty for a player who gets stuck. Ask which size a new group uses rather than assuming thirteen.
Adjusted scoring and targets — The accounts record several between them. Deduct only 1 point per card left in the Nertz pile rather than 2, which takes the edge off a bad round. Score each round as an event in its own right, the highest score simply winning it, and count rounds won instead of totalling points. End the game when the gap between the highest and lowest scores passes some figure — 100, for instance — rather than when anybody reaches a total. Turning the stock one card at a time rather than three is the other one they record, and it makes the game markedly easier for everybody at once.
Jokers — Two jokers go into each pack, each standing for whatever card you name, and they count for the same as anything else at scoring time. On the work piles they are unrestricted: a joker may be placed anywhere and nothing has to be said, though laying a real card on top of one pins its rank and colour until that card is lifted off again. Foundations are the exception, and they carry a protocol: the rank and suit must be announced while the joker is still on the pile it came from, so that anyone holding the real card has a chance to play it there first.
Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Official Game Rules, Group Games 101, Gambiter, DKM Games, Game Rules Hub.