Sheepshead

Also known as American Schafkopf, Sheephead

Players

3-5 players (best with 5)

Deck

1 standard deck stripped to 32 cards (A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7 in each suit)

Time

30-60 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Five is the number Sheepshead is written for, and what follows assumes five. Three and four also have settled forms, listed in the variants.

Strip a standard pack down to the aces, kings, queens, jacks, tens, nines, eights and sevens — thirty-two cards. Everything smaller goes back in the box.

The ranking is not the one you know and there is no way round learning it first. Fourteen of the thirty-two are trumps, permanently, deal after deal: every queen, every jack and the whole diamond suit. They run queen of clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds, then jack of clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds, then the diamonds from the ace down. The eighteen cards left over make three fail suits — clubs, spades and hearts, six apiece — each running ace, ten, king, nine, eight, seven, so the ten sits above the king. And a card made trump has left its printed suit behind for good: your jack of hearts is not a heart, so it will not answer a heart lead, and leading it asks the table for trumps.

Card values are the Schafkopf ones: an ace is 11, a ten is 10, a king 4, a queen 3 and a jack 2, with the nines, eights and sevens worth nothing. The pack holds 120, so the number to beat is 61.

Deal six cards to each player, three at a time and clockwise, and put two face down in the middle after the first round of three. Those two are the blind. Deal the blind somewhere in the middle of the deal rather than off the bottom at the end, where the last cards are the ones most likely to have been seen. The deal passes left.

One person picks up the blind each hand and takes on the table, usually with a partner nobody can identify yet. Keep score with a column per player, running plus and minus; the columns always add to zero, which is the check that nothing has gone wrong.

Play

Picking. Starting at the dealer's left and going clockwise, each player either takes the blind or passes. Whoever takes it is the picker, adds those two cards to their hand, and then buries any two face down. Buried cards are out of play but not out of the reckoning: they count to the picker's side at the end, provided that side takes at least one trick. Bury points deliberately — it is the one wholly safe place to put an ace.

If everyone passes, agree in advance what happens. The usual answers are a forced pick by the dealer, a leaster, or a doubler; all three are described in the variants.

Calling a partner. The picker names a fail ace — clubs, spades or hearts — and its holder plays as the partner for that hand without either of them admitting it. Four rules make this work rather than being a call into thin air:

• Only a fail ace may be named. Diamonds are trumps, so the ace and ten of diamonds are never available.
• Whatever suit is named, the picker has to be holding something in it, and cannot name an ace already in hand.
• That holding is then frozen. It may not be thrown away on somebody else's trick, and it has to go down the first time its suit is led.
• The partner is tied the same way in reverse, and must put the ace down the first time that suit is led even while holding other cards of it.

Two situations need a way out, and which one you are in depends on how many of the fail aces you hold. Short of all three, but with no fail card you could keep back — every one held is itself an ace, or there are none at all — you may name a suit you cannot follow and put a card face down as an unknown: it goes on the trick when the called suit is led, has no power to win it, and still counts its points to whoever does. Holding all three fail aces leaves no ace to name at all, so a ten is named instead, and the ace of that suit is what the picker keeps back for the moment its suit is led. A picker who would rather not have a partner at all announces it before the lead and plays alone against four.

The tricks. The dealer's left neighbour leads to the first trick, and thereafter the winner of a trick leads to the next. Follow suit if you can. Trump counts as its own suit here, so a trump lead demands a trump from anybody who holds one, and the queens and jacks in your hand answer to that lead rather than to whatever is printed on them. Anyone unable to follow may trump or throw off any card they like. Whoever laid the strongest card takes the trick: the top trump if any were played, and otherwise the top card of whichever fail suit opened it. A card of another fail suit cannot win a trick however large it is. Six tricks empty the hands.

Throwing a high-value card onto a trick your own side is winning is called schmearing, and it is most of what the play is about. Until the called suit appears the partner is anonymous, so the real question on almost every trick is whether the player about to win it is a friend.

Goal & scoring

Count the card points your side took. The picker and partner need 61 of the 120 and the other three need 60, so a sixty-all split is a defensive win. Two further lines matter: holding the other side under 30 is schneider and pays double, and taking every trick pays triple. Because the winning line sits at 61 rather than 60, the schneider line is 31 for the picking side and 30 for the defenders — the picker is schneidered on 30 and safe on 31.

What gets written down is a game point per player, plus and minus, adding to zero. One figure drives all of it, and it belongs to the picker, who chose the hand: 2 for a win, 4 for a win that schneiders the defence, 6 for taking every trick, and the same three numbers negative for the matching failures. The partner takes half of whatever the picker takes, and each of the three defenders pays half of it — which is what makes the columns cancel. The table has the six rows. They are the five-handed schedule, and other table sizes score differently, so a three- or four-handed game has to settle its own before the first deal.

A picker playing alone doubles their own figure, so those six become 4, 8 and 12 and the same three negatives. Each defender still wins or loses 1, 2 or 3 as before — there are simply four of them now instead of three, which is what keeps the columns adding to zero.

Two things about the losing rows are worth settling before you deal. Most tables, and by one account almost every tournament, play double on the bump, which doubles every losing row: a plain loss then costs the picker 4 and the partner 2 and pays each defender 2. It exists to make people think before picking. And where the picking side takes no trick whatever, some tables charge the entire penalty to the picker and let the partner off — minus 9 to the picker, nothing to the partner, plus 3 to each of the other three — rather than splitting it two to one. Sources differ on which of those is standard, so it is a table rule rather than a fact about the game.

There is no target score. Play an agreed number of hands, or an agreed length of evening, and the highest running total wins. Where the game is played for money, one game point is one agreed unit.

Variants

Jack of diamonds — The other common way of finding a partner. Nobody calls anything: whoever holds the jack of diamonds is the picker's partner, and since that card need not be played early the secret usually keeps longer than a called ace does. The picker who finds the jack in hand, or in the blind, normally has to play alone — though many tables let such a picker call up to the next jack they do not hold, most often the jack of hearts.

Three-handed and four-handed — Three-handed is a real game rather than a fallback, with its own long-running tournament: ten cards each, two in the blind, and the picker against the other two with no partner to find and a scoring schedule of its own to agree. Only three cards land on a trick, which lifts the fail aces a long way — one stands a real chance of taking a trick on its own — and makes how many trumps you hold matter nearly as much as which ones. Four-handed usually deals seven each with four in the blind, which means the picker buries four and, with that much hidden, commonly plays alone; some tables allow a partner and some do not. Six, seven and eight-handed forms exist too, generally by shrinking the hands and adding partners.

Leasters — One answer to a hand nobody wants. If all five pass, the blind is set aside and the hand is played with the goal reversed: no partners, no picker, and whoever finishes with the fewest card points takes a point from each of the other four. A win normally has to include at least one trick, which stops anybody taking the round by ducking everything and leaves taking all six tricks as a strange back-door win. The blind normally goes to whoever takes the last trick, and is not looked at until the hand is over.

Forced pick and doublers — The other two answers to a passed-out hand. Under a forced pick the dealer, having had the last look, must take the blind whatever is in it; tables often waive double on the bump in exchange, since the pick was not voluntary. Under a doubler the cards are simply thrown in and dealt again, and the replacement hand is played for twice the stakes, which is a real reason to find a pick in a hand you would otherwise have passed.

Cracking and blitzing — Two ways of raising the stakes mid-hand. Anyone sitting after the picker never got a chance at the blind; if they are not the partner either, they may crack — usually by rapping the table — which doubles the hand. The picking side may crack back to double it again, and some tables allow a further raise beyond that. Blitzing is the other lever: a player holding both black queens may show them to double the hand as well, normally only once somebody has cracked. Where both are in use a ceiling is worth agreeing on, because the multipliers compound.

Background

Schafkopf is Bavaria's own game, and Sheepshead is what became of it in America, down to the name: Schafkopf means sheep's head, and somebody translated it. Nineteenth-century German rule books and early twentieth-century American ones both carry it, in forms for three, four, six and eight. Whether the German name ever meant a sheep's head is another question: one account traces it to scoring a game by drawing a stylised sheep's head in nine strokes, another argues it began as a barrel head — Schaff, a barrel — and refers to what people played on.

Wisconsin adopted it thoroughly enough that it is often described as the state's unofficial card game, and Milwaukee named it the city's official one in 1983. Tournaments run there through the year, including a national three-handed one held every March since 1970, and the game also has a following in the German-settled counties of southern Indiana. The five-handed called-ace form described above is what modern accounts treat as the main game; almost everything else about it is negotiable, and a table you have not sat at before will tell you its rules first.

• classic
• counting
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Sheepshead.org.