Palace
Also known as Shithead, Karma, Shed, China Hand, Ten-Two Slide
- Players
- 2-6 players (best with 4)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed
- Time
- 15-30 minutes
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Category
- Shedding
Setup
Remove the jokers. One 52-card pack serves the whole game. One account puts it at two to five players and reckons it is better with at least three. Six is possible, but the way to get there is to put the two jokers back in rather than to add a second pack — that variant is below.
Cards rank in the ordinary ascending order with the ace on top: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, jack, queen, king, ace. Two ranks sit outside that ladder, the 2 and the 10, because either may be laid on any card whatsoever. Those two, plus four of a kind, are the whole of the special rules in the base game; the various powers people attach to sevens, eights and threes are variations and are described below.
Pick a dealer any way you like for the first hand; after that the loser of the previous hand deals. The dealer gives each player three cards face down in a row, and nobody may look at these. On top of those three, deal each player three more cards face up, so every player has three face-down cards with a face-up card covering each one. Then deal three cards to each player as a hand. That is nine cards per player. The rest goes face down in the middle as the stock.
Before the first card is played, you may swap freely between your hand and your face-up row, as many cards as you like. This matters more than it looks: your face-up cards are what you are left with in the endgame, so the usual move is to put your high cards, twos and tens on the table and take the low ones into your hand. A common alternative deal reaches the same place — three face down, then a hand of six, of which you choose three to lay face up — and has the advantage that nobody has seen the cards that end up in anyone else's hand. Once the first card has been played, the face-up cards are locked.
The player who was dealt the first face-up 3 leads. If no 3 is face up, it is whoever first calls a 3 in hand; if there is no 3 anywhere, the same procedure runs on the fours, and so on up. Play runs clockwise.
Play
On your turn you play one card, or several cards of the same rank at once, from your hand onto the discard pile in the middle. Your card must be equal to or higher than the card showing on top of the pile. Equal is enough, so a nine covers a nine. If you play more than one card, they must all be the same rank as each other. After you play, draw back up to three cards in hand while the stock lasts, taking whatever is left if it is nearly out. Once the stock is empty you simply stop drawing.
If you cannot play — or do not want to — you pick up the entire discard pile into your hand and your turn ends. You draw nothing that turn, and the middle of the table is now bare, so the next player may open with any card they like. Both accounts allow the unwilling as well as the unable to pick up, though one of them also records tables that insist you play if you can, so settle it before the first deal. Either way this is the engine of the game: the pile grows, someone eventually swallows it whole, and they are suddenly holding fifteen cards while everybody else holds three.
While you still hold hand cards at the start of a turn, those are the only cards you may play; the row in front of you stays out of reach until your hand is empty.
Two ranks break the equal-or-higher rule.
The 2 resets. You may play a 2 on absolutely any card, and once it is down the pile counts as clear: the next player may play anything they like on top of it. Nothing leaves the table, though. Every card stays in the pile, so whoever ends up picking it up still collects the lot.
The 10 burns. A 10 is legal on top of anything, or onto an empty table. Everything sitting in the middle, plus the 10 that just landed on it, leaves circulation for the rest of the hand: push the lot into a dead heap at the edge of the table, where it never rejoins the stock and can never be picked up by anyone. With the middle now empty, you top your hand back up to three and take another turn immediately, leading whatever card suits you.
Four of a kind does exactly what a 10 does. It makes no difference how the four got there — one player slapping all four down together, or three of a rank already showing and somebody adding the last one. The moment the top four cards of the pile share a rank, the pile is dead and joins the same heap as a burn, and the player who supplied that fourth card refills to three and leads again.
The hand runs through three stages. While the stock lasts you always refill to three cards, so you play out of your hand and the layout in front of you is untouched. Once the stock is empty you stop drawing and simply play your hand down. When your hand is empty, you start playing your three face-up cards, and you may play any of them, or two or three of the same rank together. Only when the face-up cards are also gone do you touch the face-down ones.
Failing on a face-up card costs you more than it looks. If you cannot or will not cover the pile from your face-up row, one account makes you surrender a face-up card onto the pile and then take the lot into your hand — so you lose the card and gain the pile. The other simply has you pick the pile up and leave your row alone. Agree which, because the first is appreciably harsher.
Face-down cards are played blind, one per turn. Pick one without looking, turn it straight onto the pile, and see what happens. If it legally covers the top card, it stays and play carries on. If it does not, you take it back along with the whole pile into your hand, and you are back to playing out of a hand until you empty it again. You may not look at a face-down card before committing to it, and you may not play two on the same turn.
If you pick up the pile at any stage you must clear your hand out again before returning to your table cards. The order is always hand, then face-up, then face-down.
Goal & scoring
You are trying not to be last. A player is finished the moment their hand, their three face-up cards and their three face-down cards are all gone. Going out on your final face-down card only counts if that card legally covers the pile, or if you flipped it onto an empty table; flip your last card and find it will not go, and the whole pile comes back to you with it.
The first player out has escaped, but the result everyone actually cares about is at the other end: play continues after each player leaves until only one still holds cards, and that player is the loser. The loser deals the next hand, and typically picks up some forfeit as well — making the tea in one account, buying the next round of drinks in the other. Some tables invert the whole thing and play for a winner, the first player to get rid of everything, rather than for a loser.
There is no point scoring. Each hand stands on its own and you simply play as many as you feel like, though some groups keep a tally of how many times each person has finished last across an evening.
One finishing detail neither account settles: if your last card is a 10, or completes four of a kind, you burn the pile and go out, leaving nothing on the table for the next player to beat. Treating you as out and letting the next player lead anything is the straightforward reading, but a table that wants a meaner endgame can rule that you may not go out on a burner. Decide before you deal.
Variants
Sevens force low — The best known of the added-power variations, and the one many players assume is part of the game: a seven obliges whoever follows to go no higher than a seven rather than beating it. A ten still goes on anything and still burns, so it is always an escape. Both accounts record this as a variation rather than as a rule, and they differ on the details — one lets an eight out of it too, and one version only allows a seven to be played when the pile is already below seven, after which play runs downward until a 2, 3 or 10 breaks it. Pick a form and say so.
Jokers, and a sixth player — Adding the two jokers is how the game stretches to six players. Jokers go down whenever you like, singly or several at once, and do one thing: they turn the direction of play around. That has a sting in a two-player game and a worse one in any game — a joker from the player after you hands the turn straight back, and what you have to beat is now your own last card, or else take the pile. A joker is not wild, and will not combine with a card of any other rank. One account instead has a joker hand the whole pile to an opponent of the joker-player's choosing.
Extra special cards — Groups pile more powers onto more ranks and almost nobody plays the same set. Recorded ones: the 8 reverses direction, or is transparent, meaning whoever follows has to beat the topmost card below it that is not itself an 8; the 3 is given that same transparent role in other tables' rules; a 7 played on anything acts as glass, so the next player must beat whatever was under it; and tens are restricted so they cannot be played on a court card. Decide the full list before dealing, because arguments about a single rank are how this game gets its rude names.
Stacking your face-up cards — While setting up, if two or more of your six visible cards share a rank you may stack them on the same face-down card rather than spreading three singles. That leaves you short in hand, so you draw back up to three from the stock — and if the cards you draw match, you may stack those too and draw again, repeating as long as it keeps working. Four jacks sitting on one pile is a pile-clearing burn waiting for the endgame. Sets stacked this way are played as a group when you reach them.
Smeghead, for a bigger table — Shuffle several packs together and deal four face-down cards, four face-up cards and a hand of four, refilling to four rather than three. The pile grows much faster with more players feeding it, so burns matter more and picking up is far more punishing, while duplicate cards make four of a kind much easier to complete. In the version recorded under this name, whoever first clears the pile with a ten or a quartet is thereafter the one who has to clear it away every time.
Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Official Game Rules, Game Rules, Cats at Cards, Gambiter, Bar Games 101.