500 Rummy

Also known as Rummy 500, 500 Rum, Pinochle Rummy

Players

2-8 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck with one or two jokers (52-54 cards) for 2 to 4 players; 2 decks (104-108) for 5 or more

Time

30-60 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Rummy family

Setup

Two to eight can play, and it is at its best with three to five. Up to four players use a single pack; from five up, shuffle two together. Whether the jokers go in is the first thing to settle — one account treats a 54-card pack as the standard one and playing without them as the variation, another has them optional — and if you do use two packs, a set has to be made of three or four different suits, so two sixes of spades alongside a six of hearts is no set.

Draw for the first deal, low card dealing, and pass the deal to the left after each hand.

Deal 7 cards to each player, one at a time, clockwise from the dealer's left. In the two-player game deal 13 each instead. Place the remainder face down as the stock and turn its top card face up to begin the discard pile.

The discard pile is the heart of this game, so lay it out properly. Stagger each new discard against the one beneath it, building a long overlapping ladder in which no card ever hides another. Anyone at the table should be able to read the pile from top to bottom at any point in the hand, which means it must never be squared up or gathered into a neat stack.

Aces work high or low but never both in the same run: A-2-3 and Q-K-A are legal, K-A-2 is not. Point values are what you will be adding up all game. An ace is worth 15, except when it is melded low in a sequence running A-2-3, where it counts 1. Kings, queens and jacks are 10 each, and so is the ten. Every other card is worth its number — though a widely published alternative flattens all of them, pips and aces alike, to a straight 5 unless the ace is played high. Pick one before the first deal, because it changes what a hand of low cards is worth carrying. The player to the dealer's left starts.

Play

Melds come in the usual two shapes: a set of three or four matching ranks, or a run of at least three cards that follow one another within a single suit. Unlike most rummies, melds are laid face up in front of you and stay yours, because at the end of the hand you are paid for the cards sitting on the table in front of you.

A turn is draw, then meld or lay off, then discard.

Drawing is where 500 Rummy differs from everything else in the family. You may take the stock's top card, or you may reach into the discard pile for any card in it, however deep. If you take a buried card, you must also take every card lying above it, and all of those go into your hand. The price of digging is an obligation: the card you reached for has to go straight onto the table this turn, either as part of a fresh meld you lay down or laid off onto a meld already showing. If you cannot place it immediately, you are not allowed to take it. Everything you scooped up on top of it is yours to keep and use later, or to be caught with.

That obligation is what makes the pile dangerous. A convenient discard early on can sit there for ten turns and then be dragged out from under a stack of eight cards by an opponent who wanted the one card underneath, and they get all eight.

The one card you may take freely is the uppermost discard, which comes with no obligation to use it — the basic Rummy rule, unchanged. You may not then discard it straight back: take the top card alone and your discard has to be some other card. Most card game books in fact apply the melding obligation to the top card too, so settle it before you deal.

After drawing you may lay down as many melds as you like, and you may lay off cards onto any meld on the table, including melds belonging to your opponents. A card laid off onto somebody else's meld counts for you, not for them, so feeding an opponent's run is a perfectly good way to bank points; keep it in front of you rather than pushing it into their spread, because at scoring time you need to see whose card it is. Nothing has to be melded; a card kept in hand is only a liability at the end of the hand.

Finish by discarding one card face up, adding it to the fan.

Calling Rummy. Throw away something meldable — onto your own spread or anybody else's — and anyone but you may shout "Rummy!" while the next turn has still not begun. They take the pile down as far as that card, meld it, and finish a normal turn with a discard of their own. Play then resumes to their left. The same call covers a pile left holding cards that can be melded without help from anyone's hand, so a run buried three discards deep is claimable by whoever spots it. You cannot call it on yourself, which is the reason not to lay a meld down the moment you can: putting 4-5-6 on the table when the 3 is sitting in the pile hands the 3 to somebody else. Not every group plays it, and some allow it only on the most recent discard.

The hand ends the moment one player has no cards left, whether their last card went down in a meld, was laid off, or was discarded. Everyone else is caught with whatever is still in hand.

A hand can also end without anyone going out. Once the stock is empty the discard pile is not turned over to make a new one, so from that point the pile is the only source of cards. A player who takes from it plays an otherwise normal turn, melding or laying off and then discarding, and the hand goes on; the usual conditions still apply, so a buried card must still be used at once. The moment the turn reaches a player who cannot take anything useful, or who simply declines to take, the hand stops there and is scored where it stands.

Goal & scoring

Score each hand separately, then keep a running total. The first player to reach 500 points wins. If two or more cross 500 in the same hand, one account gives it to the highest total and another to whoever went out; either way, if that still leaves them level, play on until somebody is ahead alone.

A player's score for the hand is a difference between two figures: what is showing in front of them, less what is trapped in their hand. Everything on the table feeds the first figure, whether it arrived there in a meld of their own or as a card laid off onto somebody else's spread; every card never played feeds the second. Aces are 15, or 1 when melded low in an A-2-3; face cards and tens are 10; every other card is its own number — unless you settled on the flat-5 scheme before the first deal, in which case everything below a ten is worth 5 and a high ace 15.

The result can easily be negative, and negative scores really are subtracted from your running total, so a player caught with two aces and a couple of kings while holding nothing on the table goes backwards. That is the game's main pressure: melding early banks points but tells everyone what you are collecting, while sitting on cards to build a bigger play risks handing back more than you make.

Going out is worth having but carries no bonus in the standard game. Its value is that it ends the hand while everyone else is still holding cards.

Variants

Going-out bonus — Going out carries no bonus in the ordinary game, and some tables add one — 25 points is the figure the partnership relatives use — on top of your melds. A companion rule requires the player going out to keep a card back to discard, so you may not meld your whole hand at once; that one is common enough that some accounts call it standard. Either pushes play toward finishing hands quickly rather than grinding out meld points, which shortens the game considerably.

Deal and target adjustments — Plenty of groups deal 7 cards in the two-player game rather than 13, which makes for shorter, tighter hands with a deeper stock. Targets move too: 200 or 300 for a quick session, 1000 for a long one. Some also stop the game after a fixed number of deals and simply take the highest score.

Wild jokers — A joker here is wild: put it down as whatever card a meld is short of, including one that has already gone down somewhere else. What they cannot do is move: melding a joker means naming the exact card it stands for, and that cannot be changed afterwards, so nobody may swap the real card in and take the joker away. A joker cannot represent a card that could not legally be there either — four kings and a joker is not a group of five, because there is no fifth king for it to be. Count them at 15.

Floating — For tables that require a discard to go out, this is the escape hatch. Meld your whole hand and, having nothing to discard, you do not go out — you float, and play carries on around you. When the turn comes back you may draw and discard, which ends the hand; or take several cards from the pile, meld all but one and discard that; or meld whatever you drew and float for another round. A stricter version will not accept a final discard that had anywhere to go, so the hand cannot end until somebody is holding a genuinely useless card.

Persian Rummy — A four-player partnership relative played with 56 cards — the standard 52 plus four jokers — with partners sitting opposite and their scores combined. The jokers are not wild here and cannot go into a sequence at all: they rank as a kind of their own, and a meld containing one has to be three or four jokers and nothing else; each is worth 20. Any meld of four laid down in one go counts double, so four jokers together are 160 where three then a fourth are 80. Going out pays your side 25. The whole game is two deals, after which the better side takes a 50-point bonus and the difference between the two totals — a much shorter proposition than the parent game's race to 500.

• classic
• counting
• family-friendly
• luck
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Denexa Games, Official Game Rules, Cool Old Games, Game Rules.

Accordion

Also known as The Idle Year, Tower of Babel, Methuselah, Leapfrog, Accordion Solitaire

Players

1 player

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards)

Time

5-15 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Solitaire (1 player)

Setup

Shuffle a full 52-card deck. Every card becomes a pile of one, and those piles sit in a single line running left to right. There are no foundations, no reserve, and no stock once the line is down. The row is the entire game.

How the row gets built is the one setup decision, and the two traditional answers produce very different games. Dealing as you go is the older habit: turn one card, put it at the right-hand end of the line, take any moves you fancy, then turn the next. You never know what is still to come. Dealing the whole pack out first spreads all 52 face up before a single move is made, which converts the deal into a puzzle you can study. The open form is enormously easier, and it has become a common way for solitaire software to present the game, so it is worth being clear which one you have agreed to play.

A line of 52 will not fit across a normal table. Lay it in bands, one under the next, and read it as a single line that wraps at the edge: the last pile of one band and the first pile of the next are neighbours. Only the exposed card of each pile is ever consulted, so keep the piles squared up rather than spread.

Play

Only the exposed card of a pile counts. Every move has to answer two questions, and both answers must come out right. Distance first: a pile travels leftward and lands either on its immediate neighbour or on the pile two beyond that, a hop of one place or of three, and no other distance exists in the game. Agreement second: the card showing on the mover and the card showing on the pile it lands on must be of one suit, or else of one rank. Fail either test and there is no move. Colour is irrelevant and so is rank order: a 4 does not go on a 5 for being next to it in sequence, it goes on another 4 for being a 4, or on any other club for being a club. Nothing ever moves rightwards, and the left-hand end of the line is a dead end by construction: the first pile has nothing to its left and can never move at all, while the second and third have a neighbour to slide onto but no pile three places back, so a leap is not available to them.

Piles move whole. You never peel a card off the top or split a packet in two; the entire pile lifts and lands squarely on the target, and whatever was showing on the mover is now showing on the merged pile. That is where the game gets its bite, because a move both shortens the line and changes what the surviving pile offers.

The short move is called a slide here and the long one a leap, following the account that coined the pair. A slide closes the line by one place and disturbs very little. A leap jumps two piles and drops the mover three back, which rearranges its whole neighbourhood at once and is the move that unlocks a run of plays a slide cannot reach.

Gaps are what catch beginners out. The row is never allowed to keep a hole in it. A pile that departs from the middle leaves a space behind, and that space disappears at once as the remainder of the row closes up behind it, so what you are looking at is one pile shorter than it was a moment ago. The cost of that tidiness is your bearings: downstream of the move, a pile that had one neighbour on its left now has another, and the pile it counts back to three places away is not the pile it was. Distances are always counted on the line as it stands, never on the line as it was dealt, and forgetting that is the commonest way to talk yourself into an illegal move.

Nothing is compulsory in the modern rules. A legal move may be declined, and declining is frequently correct, since a cheap slide can wreck a leap that would have collapsed four piles in one stroke. The nineteenth-century rules were far stricter: they oblige you to move whenever a move exists, to take the nearer pile whenever both distances are legal, and to keep playing rather than deal while any move is still there — which strips out essentially every decision.

Dealing as you go under the modern rules, you may alternate freely between turning the next card and working the line, and you may take as many moves as you like between deals or none at all. When the pack is spent there is no redeal and nothing to fall back on.

The deal ends when the pack is exhausted and no exposed card anywhere in the line matches the pile one place or three places to its left. Running dry of moves earlier does not end anything while cards remain to be turned: keep dealing, because the next card can revive a line that looked finished. Count the piles left standing.

Goal & scoring

You win by gathering the whole pack into a single pile of 52. Anything short of that is a loss.

Whether that is a hopeless ambition or a routine one depends entirely on how the row was built, and the gap between the two is enormous. Dealt blind, a card at a time, the game is very nearly unwinnable: a program taking the plays as they come wins on the order of four to six deals in ten thousand, and even its tie-break between the two distances moves that rate by half again. A classic solitaire book puts the odds at one in a hundred and says in the same breath that the figure is shorthand for a rate too low to be worth quoting. That is the game the old name The Idle Year makes fun of — you can play hundreds without a win.

Spread all 52 face up first and it is a different game. A published basic strategy — collecting the four cards of one rank together as sweepers and mopping the rest up with them — was reported to win about a third of the time, and one player who took it further reports 98 or 99 per cent. Solvers do better still: one ran hundreds of thousands of open deals without a single loss, and while unwinnable layouts can be built on purpose, no shuffled one has ever been shown to be unwinnable. One account rates open Accordion among the most winnable open patiences there is, ahead even of FreeCell.

There is no formal scoring, and the usual measure is the number of piles standing when you get stuck, one being a win and fewer always better. One published suggestion is to count five piles or fewer as a win when playing blind, which gives a session some shape without pretending the real thing is winnable on demand.

Variants

Open Accordion — Spread the whole pack face up in the line before touching anything, then work out the collapse with full information. The moves and the win condition are identical; only what you can see changes. That single difference separates a game almost nobody wins from one that is very nearly always solvable, which is why more than one published rule set now gives the open deal as the rules and the blind deal only as what came first.

Strict rules — The oldest printed form, from the 1880s, leaves you no discretion at all. Whenever a legal move exists you are obliged to make it; whenever a pile could go either one place left or three places left you must take the nearer; and you may not turn the next card while a move is still available. The outcome is then fixed entirely by the shuffle, which makes it a measuring stick rather than a game. Run automatically over all 86,400 numbered deals of one program, it came home 56 times taking the nearer move first, as the old rules require, and 37 times taking the longer one — so which of the two distances the rule picks for you is itself worth half again as many wins.

Royal Marriage — A short eliminator built on the same habit of reading a row for matches, but played by throwing cards away rather than stacking them. Cards go out in a line, and any one or two cards caught between a pair that match each other in rank or in suit are thrown away. The king and queen of one suit start at opposite ends of the layout and the aim is to strip the row until the pair is all that is left. It finishes quickly and is a far gentler introduction to the idea.

• classic
• luck
• quick
• solo
• strategy

Rules checked against Wikipedia, Solitaire Laboratory, GameRules.com, Bicycle Cards, Wikibooks Solitaire card games, BVS Solitaire, Solitaire Association.

Baccarat

Also known as Punto Banco, Baccara

Players

2-12 players (best with 6)

Deck

6 to 8 standard decks shuffled together; eight is the casino norm and six is usual online

Time

30-60 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Casino

Setup

The version played almost everywhere is Punto Banco, and its defining feature is worth knowing before you sit down: after the bet is placed, nobody decides anything. Not the players, not the dealer, not the house. Every card that is drawn is drawn because a printed rule says so, which makes this the only major card game where reading the rules and playing perfectly are the same act.

Shuffle six or eight packs together — eight on a casino floor, six in most online rooms. At home a banker deals, covers the bets and does the arithmetic; the job is mechanical, so hand it round or leave it with whoever is most willing.

Cards are worth their pip value, an ace counts one, and a ten or a court card counts nothing whatever. Totals are taken modulo ten: add the cards up and throw away everything except the last digit, so eight and six is four rather than fourteen. Nine is therefore the best hand available and there is no such thing as going bust.

Two hands are dealt each round and neither of them belongs to anyone at the table. They are called Player and Banker, and those are the names of two piles of cards rather than of any person present — the punter who has staked the most does the honours of turning them over at a full-size table, and it changes nothing. Before the deal, everyone puts money on Player, on Banker, or on the two of them finishing level.

A casino turns the first card of a fresh shoe and burns that many more off the top, then buries a cut card near the bottom — accounts put it at sixteen cards from the end or at seven — and the round in which it appears is the last before the shuffle. At home, shuffle when you are running short.

Play

Two cards go to each hand and both are turned up. If either shows a total of eight or nine it is a natural, and that settles the drawing question for both hands at once: no third card is dealt to either, whatever the other one holds.

Failing a natural, the Player hand is resolved first, on a rule with no exceptions. Six or seven, it stands. Five or less, it takes one card and only one.

The Banker hand then answers, and what it does depends on whether the Player hand took anything.

Where the Player stood, the Banker follows the same rule the Player just did: draw on five or less, stand on six or seven.

Where the Player drew, the Banker's rule takes account of the card the Player drew — the one piece of information a Banker hand has that a Player hand does not, and the whole reason the Banker bet is charged a commission:

• 7: stand.
• 6: draw only against a 6 or a 7.
• 5: draw against 4, 5, 6 or 7.
• 4: draw against anything from 2 to 7.
• 3: draw against everything except an 8.
• 0, 1 or 2: always draw.

No hand ever receives a fourth card, and the third card, where one is dealt, goes beside the two it is added to rather than replacing anything.

The table looks arbitrary because it is a fossil. Baccarat was once played with both two-card hands hidden and only the third card exposed, and these are the choices a good player would have made knowing exactly that much and no more. When the choices hardened into rules there was no longer any reason to hide the cards, so they came face up and the reasoning behind the table went out of view along with them.

With both hands complete, the totals are compared and the round is settled. Cards are cleared and the next round begins.

Goal & scoring

Whichever of the two hands finishes nearer to nine takes the round. You played neither of them, so the only thing that matters is which one you put money on.

There are three things to put it on, they cost wildly different amounts, and choosing between them is the whole of the judgement this game asks for:

• Banker, at a long-run cost of about 1.06 percent of what you stake. Make this bet. There is nothing to add to the advice.
• Player, at about 1.24 percent. Entirely defensible, and the worse of the two by a whisker.
• The tie, at about 14.4 percent where it pays 8 to 1 — better than eleven times the price of either alternative, and one of the steepest wagers anywhere in a casino. It happens to be sitting on a table otherwise known for cheap ones, which is presumably the point. British tables mostly pay it at 9 to 1, which cuts the cost to nearer 5 percent and still leaves it the worst bet on the layout.

Why only one of those is taxed: the Banker hand acts last, knowing whether the Player drew and what card it drew, and that extra sight of things makes it come out ahead slightly more often. The five percent taken from a winning Banker bet is what claws the difference back. It is rarely collected hand by hand — a marker goes out against your seat and the whole lot is settled when the shoe runs out. A tie leaves Player and Banker stakes sitting where they are rather than sweeping them away.

Nothing further is available to a player, and it is worth being blunt about that. No decision exists that could be made well. Card counting shifts the edge by about five hundredths of a percentage point, which is a rounding error; counting paired with edge sorting — reading irregularities in the backs of the cards themselves — has been reported to give a real edge, but that is a way of exploiting the equipment rather than of playing the game. The scorecard the casino hands out for recording past results records exactly that and predicts nothing, because a shoe has no memory of what it has already dealt.

No score accumulates between rounds. Play as many as suit you; what is in front of you at the end is the result.

Variants

Chemin de Fer — The older game, still dealt in a few European casinos, and the one in the early Bond films. A player holds the bank rather than the house, stakes an amount, and the others bet against it up to that total; calling banco covers the whole bank single-handed. Only two hands are dealt and you cannot choose which to back — your money is on the players' side by definition. The player with the largest bet acts for everyone and, crucially, chooses whether to take a third card instead of being told, as does the banker; the two-card hands stay hidden until the decisions are made, which is what makes the choice worth anything. Win or tie and you keep the bank, with the whole of it staked again next time. Lose and it passes on.

Baccarat Banque — Also called Baccarat à Deux Tableaux, and the oldest form of the game. The table splits into a left half and a right half, three hands are dealt — one to each side and one to the bank — and each side plays the bank independently, never each other. Betting on either side is allowed at some tables, or à cheval to split a stake across both. The bank is not passed around: one person holds it until the shoe is exhausted, they run out of money, or they choose to stand down, and they have real latitude over drawing. Usually dealt from three packs.

Mini-baccarat — The same game and the same odds on a blackjack-sized table, with one dealer handling every card rather than passing the shoe around. It is much faster, which is a mixed blessing when the house has an edge on every hand, but the minimums are a fraction of the big table's and it sits on the main floor instead of behind a rope. Midi-baccarat is the identical arrangement on a larger table, generally in the high-limit room.

Super 6 — Also sold as Punto 2000, and usually found on a mini table. The five percent commission goes altogether: a winning Banker bet pays even money, unless the Banker's winning total is exactly 6, in which case only half the stake comes back. An eight-deck shoe throws that total up around five times, and it costs more than the commission it replaces — the Banker bet's edge rises from about 1.06 percent to about 1.46 percent, the equivalent of charging nearly 5.9 percent instead of 5. What the casino gets for it is speed, since there is no commission to calculate and collect on every winning hand.

Reduced commission on Banker — Casinos occasionally shave the five percent to draw players in. Rates of four percent and 2.75 percent have both been offered, and one Las Vegas casino briefly charged nothing at all in 1989. A related London rule waives the commission on one specific winning hand — a Banker two-card three that beats a Player who drew an 8 — which takes the Banker bet's cost down to around 0.81 percent. Any of these makes the best bet in the house better still, so it is worth reading the felt.

• beginner-friendly
• betting
• classic
• large-group
• luck

Rules checked against Pagat, Wizard of Odds, Wikipedia.

Beggar-My-Neighbour

Also known as Beggar My Neighbor, Strip Jack Naked, Beat Your Neighbour Out of Doors, Draw the Well Dry

Players

2-4 players (best with 2)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed

Time

15-45 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Matching & collecting

Setup

One 52-card pack with the jokers taken out, two players for the standard game, and a clear patch of table between them. Shuffle and hand the pack round singly until none is left, which comes to twenty-six apiece. No card is looked at by anybody at any stage, including its owner. Square your half into a face-down stack and keep it squared.

Only four ranks do anything at all. Everything from the 2 up to the 10 is an ordinary card: inert, interchangeable, no different in play from any other. The jack, queen, king and ace are the exceptions, and the game calls them pay cards because turning one puts the other player in debt. Beyond that distinction nothing about a card matters — no card beats another, sequence never comes into it, and suits are ignored from the first turn to the last.

Whoever shuffles deals. Who turns the very first card is not something the accounts settle, so fix it between you before you shuffle rather than after: although neither player will make a single choice all game, who starts is one of the two things — the shuffle being the other — that decides the whole result. Leave the middle clear: a single face-up pile grows there and changes hands over and over until somebody is cleaned out.

With three or four players, deal the pack round as evenly as it will go and set aside nothing — an odd card or two makes no difference to a game with no scoring in it.

Play

Turn the top card of your stack face up into the middle and leave it there. Your opponent lays their next card on top of it, then you again, and so on. As long as only ordinary cards appear, that is the whole game: two people alternately feeding one growing pile.

A pay card interrupts it. Whoever turns one is owed cards by the other player, and the rank of the card sets the size of the debt, running from a single card for a jack up to four for an ace.

The player in debt then turns cards one at a time onto the same pile, counting them out, and one of two things happens.

• Nothing but ordinary cards comes out. The debt is discharged, and the pile belongs to the player whose pay card went unanswered. They gather up every card of it, slide the lot face down beneath their own stack, and open a fresh pile with their next card.
• A pay card comes out. Payment halts on the spot, whatever was still owed is written off, and the obligation rebounds: the other player now owes for the card just turned. Three and four rebounds in a row are ordinary, and the pile can grow enormous before anybody collects it.

Cards you win go under your stack in the order you scooped them up. The traditional game involves no shuffling whatever after the deal, which is worth knowing because it is the reason a game can run as long as it sometimes does.

One line covers most of it: run dry before your opponent does and you have lost. That leaves an edge case worth settling before you deal, because a debt is paid as far as it will go — owe four, hold two, and you turn both. If the second of them is an ordinary card you are finished. If it is a pay card you are arguably still alive, since your opponent now owes you and may fail to answer, in which case the whole pile comes across and you carry on with it. Agree in advance whether an empty stack ends the game on the spot, or only when you are next required to turn a card and cannot.

Three or four can play. The turn passes to the left in Britain and North America, while one Caribbean version of the game goes the other way round. The debt always falls on the next player round the table and keeps moving in that direction as it rebounds; a player already knocked out is skipped over. Anyone whose cards run out drops out and the rest continue, and the pile still goes to whoever played the last pay card nobody could answer — that player then opens the next pile. The last player left with cards has all fifty-two and has won.

Goal & scoring

You win by ending up with all fifty-two cards, which is the same thing as your opponent running dry. Nothing is scored, nothing is written down, and no pile is worth more than any other.

It is worth being blunt about what this game is. There are no decisions in it anywhere. You never pick which card to play, because the card you play is whichever one the shuffle left on top of your stack; you never pick whether to pay, because paying is compulsory; and since won cards go back in a fixed order and are never shuffled, everything that will happen is fixed by the deal. Two children could in principle hand the pack to an adult, be told who wins, and skip the game entirely. For a five-year-old that is precisely the appeal — all of the suspense with nothing to learn — and for anybody older it is why the novelty lasts about twenty minutes.

The same determinism makes the length wildly unpredictable, and it turned the game into a genuine mathematical curiosity. Think of the two stacks together as a single state of fifty-two cards. Every turn maps one state to exactly one next state, so if a deal ever arrives back at a state it has occupied before, it is trapped: the stretch between the two visits must now repeat, unaltered, without end. Whether any deal actually does this went unanswered for decades, and John Conway used to pose it as an anti-Hilbert problem, a question of no importance at all that nobody could crack. Searches turned up longer and longer finite games — the longest known to end runs to 1,164 pile-collections, over the course of which cards are played 8,344 times — until a non-terminating deal was finally published in 2024.

If you want a game that certainly ends, cap it before you start: play for a fixed ten or fifteen minutes and give it to whoever holds more cards, or agree that the first player reduced below some number has lost. Counting is quick, because the two stacks always add up to fifty-two.

Variants

Jokers in — Leave both jokers in the pack and rank them above the ace as pay cards worth five. Fifty-four cards deal out at twenty-seven apiece with nothing left over, and a joker turned mid-payment is the most brutal rebound in the game, since the opponent has to find five cards and any one of them can bounce it straight back. It makes the pile swing more violently without adding a single decision.

Slapping — Add a reflex layer: when two cards of the same rank land on top of one another, the first player to slap the pile takes it, regardless of who owes what and regardless of any payment in progress. This is the doorway to the noisier games in the same family: Egyptian Ratscrew is this game with slapping added — though the slapping idea may itself have travelled the other way, out of Slapjack. It is the cheapest way to give Beggar-My-Neighbour something a player can actually be good at.

Shuffling your winnings — When you collect a pile, shuffle it before putting it under your stack instead of returning it in order. This is a house fix rather than the traditional rule, and it changes the character of the game: no deal can then cycle forever, because the order is randomised every time cards change hands, so the game ends with certainty. The price is that it destroys the mathematical curiosity that makes the game interesting to anybody over ten.

Paying from a hand — A version in which players hold their cards as a hand they can see and choose which cards to hand over when a debt falls due, rather than paying blind off the top of a stack. It supplies the only decisions the game can have — you hold your own pay cards back for when they will rebound most usefully — at the cost of the thing that makes the ordinary game usable by children who cannot yet fan a hand.

Background

A British game, played there from the 1840s at the latest and possibly far older: it may be the same thing as a game called beat the knave out of doors, which turns up as early as 1755. It has collected a great many names. Taxes is one, Strip Jack Naked another, Beat Jack Out Of Doors and Beat Your Neighbour Out Of Doors two more; in Trinidad and Barbados it is Suck the Well, and in France sometimes Bataille Corse, Corsican battle.

It is the game Victorian children were given, and it shows up in their novels — Dickens gives it to Pip in Great Expectations as the only game he knows, and Wilkie Collins has two men in Hide and Seek playing it for sixpence a time. Its own descendant, Egyptian Ratscrew, is this game with slapping bolted on.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• kids
• luck
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Gamerules.com, Official Game Rules, Denexa Games, Dummies, Casella and others, A Non-Terminating Game of Beggar-My-Neighbor.

Belote

Also known as Belote Classique, Belotte

Players

4 players

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

Four players in two fixed partnerships, partners facing each other. Build the pack by pulling every card below the seven out of a standard deck, which leaves thirty-two.

Cut for the first deal. After that the deal moves to the right, and so does play — belote is one of the French games that runs anticlockwise, and getting the direction wrong is the commonest mistake at a mixed table. Traditionally the pack is shuffled only once at the start of a session and merely cut between hands, so the order the tricks left it in carries forward. Plenty of tables shuffle anyway; agree which you are doing.

Deal five cards to each player in two packets, three then two or two then three, and turn the next card face up in the middle. That card is the retourne, and it is the trump on offer. The other eleven sit face down beside it, untouched for the moment.

Before anything else, learn the two rankings, because trump and plain suits use different ones and neither is the order you already know. A plain suit runs ace, ten, king, queen, jack, nine, eight, seven from the top. In trump the jack vaults to first and the nine to second, giving jack, nine, ace, ten, king, queen, eight, seven.

Card values split the same way. Outside trump an ace is 11, a ten is 10, a king 4, a queen 3, a jack 2, and the nine, eight and seven count nothing. In trump the jack is worth 20 and the nine 14, while the ace, ten, king and queen keep their ordinary values and the eight and seven are still blanks. The pack therefore holds 152 points, and the final trick is worth 10 more, so every deal puts 162 on the table before any declaration is counted.

Play

Bidding. Starting with the player on the dealer's right and going round to the right, each player in turn either takes the retourne's suit as trump or passes. Whoever takes it becomes the taker, picks the card up into hand, and commits their partnership to the contract. If all four pass, a second round starts from the same seat, and now a player may name any of the other three suits as trump — never the suit that was turned. Taking in the second round still means taking the card: the taker adds the face-up card to their hand, where it is now just an ordinary card of a plain suit. Four more passes and the hand is dead; the cards are gathered and the next player to the dealer's right deals afresh.

Once trump is settled the rest of the pack goes out. The taker, already holding the turned card, gets two more; each of the other three gets three. Everyone finishes with eight and nothing is left over.

Declarations. Combinations held in the hand pay, but only one side collects them. Runs of three, four, and five or more cards in a single suit score, and so does four of a kind in any rank except the eights and sevens.

The catch is that runs are read in the ordinary order — ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine, eight, seven — which has nothing to do with the order the cards take tricks in. The three biggest trumps sitting in your hand look magnificent and are not a run at all.

Collecting them is a contest, and it is settled over the first trick. Each player who holds something announces it as they play their card to that trick, naming the kind and, if a rival claims the same kind, the top card of it — never the suit. Once the trick is complete the best declaration at the table is known: the side that owns it scores every declaration on its side, and the other side scores none of its own, however many it was holding. Four of a kind outranks any run; between runs the longer wins, and between runs of equal length the higher top card. Should the two best still be dead level, the one in trump prevails, and if neither is in trump nobody scores. The side that has won the contest lays the cards face up as it plays to the second trick, so the other side can see the combination was real; a declaration never shown is never paid.

Belote-rebelote stands outside all of that. Hold the king and queen of trumps and you say belote as you play the first of the pair and rebelote as you play the second, which is worth 20 to your side. It cannot be outranked, it never competes with anything, and it counts whether the rest of the hand goes well or badly. Forget to say it at the right moment and it is gone.

The tricks. The player on the dealer's right leads to the first trick. What you are allowed to put on a trick is far more constrained than in most trick games:

• Follow the suit led whenever you hold it.
• When trump is led, following is not enough: play a trump higher than any already in the trick if you have one. If every trump you hold is lower you must still follow with one of them. (Most French tables demand this even when your own partner is winning the trick; a few release you. Agree before the first deal.)
• Void in a plain suit an opponent is winning, you must trump it.
• Void in a plain suit that an opponent has already trumped, you must beat that trump if you hold a higher one. If your trumps are all lower you must still play one, throwing it away for nothing.
• Void in a plain suit while your own partner is winning the trick, you are released from all of it: play any card you like, trump or not.
• Void in the suit led with no trump left at all, you are equally free, and simply discard.

Having to throw a losing trump under an opponent's higher one is the rule that catches newcomers, and the partner exemption is the one that saves them: when your partner already holds the trick, French players say the partner is master, and you are released from having to trump at all.

The highest trump takes the trick, or the highest card of the suit led when no trump is played, and the winner leads to the next. Eight tricks empty the hands.

Goal & scoring

At the end of the hand each side counts the card values in the tricks it took, whoever took the last trick adds 10 for it, and each side adds the declarations it is entitled to.

Everything then hinges on one comparison: did the takers finish with at least as many points as their opponents? If so, nothing needs adjusting anywhere and each side banks the total it just counted — and note the direction of that, because it makes a dead heat at 81 apiece a success for the takers rather than a failure. Only when the takers come out strictly behind has the deal collapsed into what French players call dedans. Nothing the takers gathered stays with them. The full 162 crosses the table, and so does every declaration point earned during the deal, theirs as well as the defenders' own, all of it written into the defenders' column. Belote-rebelote is the exception that survives: those 20 belong to the player who called them and are not affected by how badly the rest of the deal went.

Taking all eight tricks is capot and pays 90 above the trick score, so a side that sweeps the hand books 252 before anything it declared.

The match runs to 1000 points and the first side to reach it wins. Should both sides cross in the same deal, the game is drawn.

Variants

Coinche (Belote Contrée) — The tournament form, and in France at least as popular as the parent game. The retourne disappears: all eight cards are dealt at once and the players hold an auction, bidding a number of points from 80 upward together with the suit they intend to play in. Any opponent may coincher, doubling the stakes, and the bidding side may surcoincher to double them again. The contract must be made exactly as bid or the whole value goes to the defenders, which turns the game from a matter of card play into a matter of accurate valuation. Scores are normally rounded to the nearest ten.

Belote sans annonces — Belote with declarations switched off entirely, apart from belote-rebelote, which everybody keeps. Runs and four of a kind are worth nothing and are not announced at the first trick. It strips out the fiddliest part of the rules and the whole business of comparing declarations, so it is what most tables teach a beginner on before adding the announcements back in a few hands later.

All trumps and no trumps — Two extra contracts widely used in Coinche and standard across the Balkans. In tout atout every suit ranks and scores as trump, so all four jacks are worth 20 and all four nines 14, and the deal holds 248 in the cards plus 10 for the last trick, or 258. In sans atout no suit is trump, every suit ranks the plain way, and the values are doubled to compensate for how little the pack is otherwise worth — ace 22, ten 20, king 8, queen 6, jack 4, and 20 for the last trick, giving 260. Because neither total is 162, both are scaled back against it before a contract in them can be compared with a suit contract. French coinche tables often prefer a third arrangement for no trumps, counting the ace as 19 and everything else normally, which lands on 162 exactly and needs no scaling at all.

Short-handed belote — Belote for two or three players drops the partnership and keeps everything else: both rankings, the card values, the declarations and belote-rebelote, the obligations to follow, beat and trump, and the taker alone against whoever is left. What has no settled form is the deal, which differs from region to region and from app to app — some three-player versions share out all thirty-two cards and do without a talon, others keep the retourne and a face-down remainder, and the two-player versions usually draw from a stock after each trick until it is exhausted and then play out the closing tricks under the full obligations. Fix the deal and the target score before you start rather than halfway through. Useful for learning the ranking without three other people waiting.

Litige — A different way of handling the 81-all deal, which the main rules simply award to the takers. Under litige only the defenders write their 81 down; the takers' half is neither scored nor discarded but waits, unowned, and attaches itself to the next deal somebody actually brings home, going to that side on top of whatever they score there. Tie again and a second 81 joins the first, so the pot swells until a contract finally succeeds. It turns the one deal that can otherwise feel like nothing happened into something worth winning the next one for.

• classic
• counting
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Britannica, Denexa Games, Fédération Française de Belote, iBelote, Nordic Card Games.

Bezique

Also known as Bésigue

Players

2 players

Deck

2 standard decks stripped to 64 cards (two each of A, 10, K, Q, J, 9, 8, 7 in every suit), made by taking the 2s to 6s out of both

Time

45-90 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Strictly two players, and the first thing to fix in your head is the rank order, because it is not the usual one: A, 10, K, Q, J, 9, 8, 7. The ten sits second, above the king. It is also, along with the ace, one of only two cards worth capturing. Read the ten as a low card and you will spend the evening feeding the two most valuable cards in every suit to the other side of the table.

The pack is 64 cards. Take everything below the seven out of two standard decks and shuffle what remains together, which leaves two copies of every card from the ace down.

Cut for the deal, high card dealing. Eight cards go to each player in packets of three, two and three. The next card is turned face up between you and its suit is trumps for the whole hand; everything still undealt goes face down beside it as the stock.

Keep something to write on. Scores land at odd moments and several of them are large, and nobody can reconstruct them afterwards from the cards on the table.

The non-dealer leads to the first trick.

Play

A hand comes in two halves that play by different rules, and almost everything that makes the game worth playing happens in the first.

WHILE THE STOCK LASTS

Lead any card you like. Your opponent answers with whatever they please: in this half of the hand, suit and trump alike are entirely free. Whoever showed the highest card in the suit that was led takes the trick, and any trump beats a lead in a plain suit. Because the pack is doubled you will sometimes see the same card twice in one trick; the one played first takes it.

Winning a trick buys you three things in order. You may declare one meld, scoring it immediately. You then draw the top card of the stock and your opponent draws the next, so both hands return to eight. Then you lead to the next trick. The loser of a trick declares nothing, whatever they are holding.

A meld is laid face up in front of you and stays there, but the cards are still yours to play — they go to tricks whenever you choose, and once played they are gone. Every card of a combination has to be in front of you or in your hand at the same moment to score it; nothing already taken into a trick counts toward anything.

A trick buys one scored meld and no more. If laying cards down happens to complete two, say so and score the second after your next trick, assuming it survives that long.

Re-using cards is where the game rewards planning, and it has a rule with a direction to it. A card already melded can join a different kind of combination later, but only one worth more than the one it came from. A king counted in a marriage can go on to be part of four kings; a king counted in four kings cannot be walked back into a marriage. What you may never do is score the same kind of combination twice with the same card — the queen you married cannot be married again to the pack's other king of her suit.

THE SEVEN OF TRUMPS

The seven of trumps, the dix, is worth 10 and is handled apart from the melds. A seven turned up for trumps at the deal scores its 10 for the dealer there and then. Holding one, you may swap it for the turned-up trump card when it is your turn to lead, taking that card into hand and scoring 10. There are two of them in the pack; the second scores its 10 simply for being played to a trick.

The stock runs for twenty-four tricks. On the last of them the winner draws the final face-down card and the loser takes the turn-up, which leaves eight cards each and nothing to draw from.

THE LAST EIGHT TRICKS

Now the game turns strict, and it turns strict in three ways at once. You must follow the suit led if you can. You must beat the card led if you can. If you cannot follow, you must trump. Only a player with neither the suit nor a trump may throw anything.

Nothing is declared in this half. Melded cards on the table are simply part of your hand for the purpose of obeying those obligations, which is what makes an unplayed meld a liability at the end — a row of face-up aces tells your opponent exactly what you are forced to do.

Winning the very last trick of the hand is worth 10. One account instead attaches that 10 to the last trick before this phase begins, so agree which you are using; the same account's own text puts it at the end.

Three penalties are recorded, and they exist because the two-hand game is easy to get quietly wrong. Holding more than eight cards during the first phase gives your opponent 100. Failing to draw after a trick gives them 10. Failing to follow suit or to win when the last eight tricks required it hands them every brisque you have left.

Goal & scoring

You are playing to 1,000 points, which usually takes three or four hands. Points arrive from two places that pull against each other, and learning which one to chase in a given hand is the whole game.

Melds are the larger source and the more spectacular. They are declared one at a time, only by the winner of a trick, and they run from a plain marriage at 20 up to the double bezique at 500 — a single declaration worth half the game. The bezique itself is the combination the game is named for, and it is fixed rather than following trumps: the queen of spades with the jack of diamonds, whatever suit happens to be trumps that hand.

Brisques are the steady source. Every ace and every ten you take in a trick is worth 10 at the end of the hand, and since the doubled pack holds eight of each there are 160 points sitting in the tricks. They are counted only once the last trick has been played, so it is easy to spend a whole hand chasing melds and discover you have handed over more than a bezique's worth of aces doing it.

That is the tension worth stating plainly. A card kept back for a meld is a card not winning tricks, and an ace thrown to capture a ten is an ace that will not be part of four aces. The player who scores heavily in melds has usually let the brisques go, and the reverse happens just as often.

Memory does the rest. With two of every card there are eight of each rank in play, and the most expensive mistake in the game is holding three queens back for a fourth that has already gone into somebody's trick pile.

Variants

Rubicon Bezique — The four-pack game, 128 cards, and one of the two forms one account records as still played in the United States. Nine cards each, and no card is turned for trumps — the suit is set by the first marriage or sequence anybody scores, so the opening tricks are played blind. The dix loses its value entirely, the last trick jumps to 50, and a sequence in a plain suit is worth 150. Beziques multiply: 40, then 500 for two, 1,500 for three and 4,500 for four. Each deal is its own game, scores rounded down to the nearest 100, and the winner takes 500 plus the difference. Fail to reach 1,000 and you are rubiconed, which hands your opponent 1,000 plus both scores added together — so the target is not a finish line but a floor you have to clear.

Six-pack, or Chinese Bezique — Rubicon again, scaled up: six packs, 192 cards, twelve dealt to each player. It is the version Winston Churchill played and was an early expert at, and the other of the two forms still recorded in play in the United States. The extra packs make the huge melds reachable rather than theoretical, and a hand takes correspondingly longer.

Polish Bezique — One rule changes and the whole game turns over: melds are built only from cards you have captured in tricks, never from your hand. Won tricks stay face up in front of you, and after each one you may score up to two melds, since each of the two cards you have just taken can feed one. Melding also carries on after the stock is gone, which standard bezique forbids. Winning tricks stops being a way of buying the right to declare and becomes the only way to assemble anything.

Stricter melds — Two tightenings, recorded as variations rather than as the rule. The bezique may be made to move: when spades or diamonds are trumps it becomes the queen of clubs with the jack of hearts instead, so the combination is never in the trump suit. And a meld of four may be required to hold one card of each suit, which stops the doubled pack producing four kings out of two pairs and makes every such meld considerably harder.

Carte blanche — A hand dealt with no ace, ten, king, queen or jack in it can be shown to your opponent and scored for 50. One account records it as a regional addition rather than part of the two-hand game, though it is standard in Rubicon, where you may score it again on every draw until a court card finally arrives.

• classic
• counting
• long-game
• strategy
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia.

Big Two

Also known as Big 2, Big Deuce, Deuces, Choh Dai Di, Chor Dai Di, Dai Di, Pusoy Dos, Capsa Banting

Players

2-4 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed

Time

20-45 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Shedding

Setup

Use the whole 52-card pack with the jokers taken out. Two things about this deck have to be fixed in your head before you sort your hand, and both cut against ordinary card sense.

The rank order climbs 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, king, ace, 2. The two is therefore the best card and the three the worst, which is where the game gets its name. On top of that, suits are ranked as well, and the ranking is live in every comparison the game makes: spades over hearts, hearts over clubs, clubs over diamonds. Between them, rank and suit give all 52 cards a single unbroken order with no ties anywhere in it, running from the three of diamonds at the very bottom to the two of spades at the very top.

Choose the first dealer however you like; after that whoever won the last hand deals the next. Deal and play both run anticlockwise, so the cards go out to the dealer's right — American and Indonesian tables commonly reverse that and play clockwise, which changes nothing except who sits downstream of whom. Give thirteen cards to each player, one at a time. Four players use the entire pack. Three take seventeen each, with the fifty-second card turned in the middle and added to the hand of whoever holds the three of diamonds, so nothing goes missing from the count; two-handed practice varies between seventeen, twenty-one and thirteen cards each, and there the remainder is set aside unseen.

Whoever holds the three of diamonds opens every deal, and their opening play must contain that card, either on its own or inside a pair, a triple or a five-card hand built around it. Where cards have been set aside and the three of diamonds is not in play, the opening belongs to whoever was dealt the lowest card that is — lowest rank first, lowest suit between equal ranks — and that card has to appear in the opening play in the same way. Many groups instead apply the lowest-card rule only to the first deal of a session and let the winner of each hand open the next, free to lead any legal play at all. Agree which convention is in force before the first shuffle.

Play

Every play is one of exactly four sizes: a single card, two cards of the same rank, three cards of the same rank, or a five-card hand. Four cards on their own are not a legal play in the standard game, and neither is any other number.

Going round from the opening lead, each player either passes or beats the play sitting on the table. A beat has to be the same size as the play it answers. Singles answer singles, pairs answer pairs, triples answer triples, five-card hands answer five-card hands. There is no way to change the size part way through a round, and no number of extra cards helps.

How plays of the same size are compared:

• Singles: rank first, and the suit ranking settles two cards of the same rank. The two of spades is the top card in the pack, so a single two of spades can never be beaten.
• Pairs: rank first; when two pairs share a rank, the one containing the higher suit takes it.
• Triples: rank alone, since no two triples can share a rank.
• Five-card hands: the shape of the hand decides first. From weakest to strongest they go straight, flush, full house, four of a kind with any odd fifth card, straight flush. Only when two hands are the same shape do you look inside them, and then a full house goes by its triple, a four of a kind by its quartet, a straight or straight flush by its highest card and, if that card is the same rank in both, by its suit, and a flush by its suit before anything else, with the highest card separating two flushes of the same suit.

Sequences are the one place where the two stops being the best card in the pack. In the basic game it ranks below the three for this purpose alone, so the highest straight is 10-J-Q-K-A and the lowest is A-2-3-4-5, with 2-3-4-5-6 just above that and 3-4-5-6-7 above that again. An ace may sit at either end of a sequence but never in the middle, which rules out K-A-2-3-4 and J-Q-K-A-2. Where exactly the two and the ace belong is the most argued-over rule in Big Two, and it changes from country to country and from table to table, so settle it out loud before the first deal; the reported orders are set out in the variants.

What a pass costs you is the other rule to settle before the first lead, because two answers are in circulation and they produce quite different hands. Ordinarily a pass gives up only that one turn. You are never obliged to beat a play just because you can, and if somebody else beats it you may come back in when the turn next reaches you. Indonesian play uses the strict rule instead: a pass puts you out of the round altogether, even if the play comes back to something you could have beaten with ease. That makes a pass a genuine decision rather than a way of waiting to see what happens, and it lets a player whose lead nobody beat go on to beat their own cards, with everyone else already shut out of the round.

Either way, the round ends as soon as nobody will beat the cards on the table: under the looser rule when the turn has gone right round without a beat, under the strict one when everyone still in has passed. How many cards each player is holding stays public throughout: ask, and you must be answered truthfully. The player whose cards are on top then sweeps the pile face down out of the way and leads again with anything at all: any size, any shape, with no relation whatever to the play that just won.

The hand ends the instant somebody lays down their last card. Nobody plays on to sort out the remaining places. Your final play may be one that nobody at the table could have beaten, and there is no obligation to leave yourself a card that others still have a chance against.

Goal & scoring

The hand belongs to the first player to get rid of every card they hold, and it stops there. Everyone else is charged for whatever they are still holding, and the charge climbs steeply against a player who barely got started, which is what stops people sitting on their twos all evening waiting for a clean run.

The simplest bookkeeping is a straight payment: each loser gives their penalty to the winner. Groups playing for money more often settle every pair of players separately, each paying everyone with a smaller penalty the difference between the two totals, which lets a close second finish the hand ahead of the field without having won it.

The usual schedule is one unit for every card still in hand, doubled for a player caught with ten to twelve of them and tripled for one still holding all thirteen. Where those multipliers kick in is regional and worth agreeing on beforehand. Plenty of tables set the bar lower, so that being caught with eight or nine cards already doubles the charge and holding all thirteen quadruples it.

There is no target score in the traditional game. Play an agreed number of deals, or simply until people have had enough, and add up: the lowest running total wins the session. If two players finish level and it matters to anyone, deal one more hand and let that settle it.

Variants

Honour hands as bombs — An honour hand — four of a kind with its odd fifth card, or a straight flush — may be dropped on a single, a pair or a triple, ignoring the usual size-matching rule, and takes the round outright. It gives a player who has been frozen out by high singles a way back into the hand, and it makes splitting a natural four of a kind into a full house a much harder decision than it looks. A separate and smaller variation simply lets four cards of a rank be played without any fifth card, as a size of their own that only a higher four can beat.

Where the sequences stop — The top and bottom of the sequence order is the game's least settled rule, and the reports do not agree even within one country. One account of Hong Kong play puts A-2-3-4-5 highest, then 2-3-4-5-6, then 10-J-Q-K-A and on down to 3-4-5-6-7, with J-Q-K-A-2 no sequence at all; another calls the commonest Hong Kong version the one where the two simply ranks high and is never consecutive with a three, making J-Q-K-A-2 the highest and 3-4-5-6-7 the lowest. Elsewhere some tables crown 2-3-4-5-6 with A-2-3-4-5 second, some crown A-2-3-4-5, some refuse A-2-3-4-5 as a sequence at all, and some rank J-Q-K-A-2 over 2-3-4-5-6 over 10-J-Q-K-A, reasoning from a comparison that works down the cards in order of ordinary rank. Indonesian play puts any sequence containing a two above every sequence that does not, and separates two of them by the suit of the two. Any of these is playable; what is not playable is two people at the same table using different ones.

Steeper penalties — A harsher charge for the cards left in hand, common wherever the game is played for real stakes: double for a player left with eight or nine cards, triple for ten to twelve, and quadruple for anyone still holding the full thirteen. It raises the pressure to unload low cards early and makes a hand of scattered singletons genuinely frightening rather than merely bad.

Dragon wins — A player dealt a dragon at some Hong Kong tables — one card of every rank, the three right up through the ace and the two as well, which accounts for all thirteen cards — wins the deal on the spot. Each of the other three is then charged the full thirty-nine points, exactly as though they had sat the hand out without playing a card.

Short-handed play — Three players are normally dealt seventeen cards each, with the fifty-second card turned in the middle and added to the hand of whoever holds the three of diamonds — or to the holder of the three of clubs, if the turned card is itself the three of diamonds. Nothing is missing from the count that way. A smaller variation deals thirteen each and leaves the rest as a stock: a pass costs you a card drawn from it, and some groups charge as many cards as the play you declined to make. Two-handed practice varies between seventeen, twenty-one and thirteen cards each with the remainder always set aside unseen, which makes the two-handed game the one where a large block of the pack really is unaccounted for.

• betting
• classic
• counting
• strategy
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Cool Old Games, Gambiter, Denexa Games, Official Game Rules, Cats at Cards, Group Games 101, HobbyLark.

Blackjack

Also known as Twenty-One, 21, Vingt-un

Players

2-8 players (best with 5)

Deck

1 to 8 standard decks shuffled together; six is the casino norm, one or two is fine at home

Time

30-60 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Casino

Setup

One person is the dealer and everyone else bets against them. A casino table seats up to seven players, so with a dealer you want between two and eight people. At home, either appoint a permanent dealer or rotate the role, since the dealer holds a small built-in advantage and rotating shares it around.

Shuffle the decks together. Casinos deal six decks from a shoe; one or two decks shuffled by hand is perfectly good for a kitchen table. Agree a minimum and maximum stake before you start, and give everyone chips or counters.

Card values: 2 through 10 count face value, jacks, queens and kings count 10, and an ace counts 1 or 11, whichever suits your hand better at the moment. A hand holding an ace that can still count 11 without busting is called soft, so ace-6 is a soft 17 and can be hit without risk. Once counting the ace as 11 would put you over 21 it reverts to 1 and the hand is hard. Suits are irrelevant throughout.

Every round starts with each player placing a bet in their betting spot. Once all bets are down, the dealer deals clockwise: one card to each player, one to themselves face up, then a second card to each player and a second to themselves face down. That face-down card is the hole card, and it is what the whole game turns on. In shoe games the players' cards are dealt face up and are not touched; in hand-dealt single-deck games they come face down and players pick them up. Neither changes the odds.

An ace plus any ten-value card in your first two cards is a blackjack, also called a natural. It is the best hand in the game and is settled at a better rate than an ordinary win.

Play

Before anyone acts, the dealer checks for a natural. If the upcard is an ace, the dealer first offers insurance: a side bet that pays 2 to 1 whenever the hidden card proves to be worth ten. The two accounts here differ on the detail. One offers it only against an ace and lets you stake anything up to half your original bet; the other offers it against a ten-value upcard as well and fixes the stake at exactly half. Ask, or agree it beforehand. A player holding a blackjack against a dealer ace may instead take even money, which is the same wager in disguise and pays their hand 1 to 1 immediately. When the upcard is an ace or a ten-value card, the dealer then peeks at the hole card. If it is a natural, the round is over at once: insurance is paid, every ordinary hand loses, and any player who also holds a blackjack pushes.

Otherwise the first decision falls to whoever sits on the dealer's left, and the turn passes clockwise. Each player finishes their hand completely before the next one starts. Your options on your first two cards are:

Hit. Take another card. You may keep hitting as long as you are under 21. Where the cards are dealt face up you signal this by tapping the felt beside them rather than saying it out loud, so the decision is on camera.

Stand. Take nothing more and let the hand ride, signalled by sweeping a flat palm sideways above them.

Double down. Double your original bet and take exactly one more card, then you are done whatever the total. Most tables allow this on any two cards; some restrict it to hard totals of 9, 10 or 11.

Split. If your two cards are a pair, put out a second bet equal to the first and separate them into two hands, each of which is dealt a second card and then played out in turn. Two cards of the same rank always count as a pair, and at nearly every table any two ten-value cards do as well, so a king alongside a ten may be split even though the ranks differ. If a split hand pairs again you can usually split once more, generally to a limit of four hands. Two things about split aces are worth settling first: they usually receive exactly one card each and may not be hit again, though one account records that restriction as common rather than universal. And any two-card 21 made on a split hand counts as an ordinary 21 rather than a natural, so it pays 1 to 1, pushes against a dealer's three-card 21, and loses to a dealer's blackjack. Whether you may double after splitting varies by house.

Surrender. Where offered, you may abandon the hand before drawing any card and forfeit half your bet. This is late surrender, meaning it is only available after the dealer has confirmed no natural. Plenty of tables do not offer it at all.

Going over 21 is a bust. Your cards are taken and your bet is collected immediately, before the dealer plays. That is the whole basis of the house edge: you lose a bust hand even if the dealer goes on to bust as well.

When every player has finished, the dealer turns the hole card up and plays by fixed rule, with no choices at all. The one exception is that if every player has already busted there is nothing left to beat, so the dealer collects the bets and the round ends without another card being drawn. The dealer draws to any total of 16 or less and stands on any total of 17 or more, counting a soft 17 such as ace-6 as a 17 and standing on it. None of those options belong to the dealer: no doubling, no splitting, no surrender. If the dealer busts, every player still standing wins.

Rounds run back to back for as long as you want to keep playing. Casinos bury a cut card partway down the shoe and reshuffle at the end of whichever round reaches it, so the shoe is never dealt to the bottom. At home, play out the round you are in, then collect the discards and reshuffle everything before the next deal. If the cards do run out part-way through a round, shuffle the discard pile at once, leaving the cards already on the table where they are, and carry on dealing from it.

Goal & scoring

The aim is to finish with a hand closer to 21 than the dealer's without going over. You are not racing the other players; every hand is settled independently against the dealer alone.

Settlement once the dealer's hand is complete:

A winning hand pays 1 to 1, so a 10-chip bet returns your 10 plus 10 more. A blackjack pays 3 to 2, so a 10-chip bet returns your 10 plus 15. A tie is a push and your stake comes back untouched. A losing hand or a bust loses the stake. Insurance is settled separately from the hand it was placed alongside, so you can lose the hand and still collect on insurance, or the other way round.

A blackjack beats any 21 built from three or more cards, and it is paid at the better rate; a three-card 21 against a dealer blackjack simply loses. Two blackjacks push.

There is no running score. You play as many rounds as you like and count your chips at the end. Sensible play matters. Correct basic strategy holds the long-run cost below one percent of everything you stake, which one account calls about the cheapest thing on a casino floor; another lists real six-deck games running nearer four tenths of a percent. Either way it is about as good as a casino game gets, and only if you play correctly. Insurance is a losing bet at almost any count, and a table paying 6 to 5 on blackjacks instead of 3 to 2 adds roughly another 1.4 percent, wiping out that edge several times over.

Variants

Dealer hits soft 17 — The dealer must draw on a soft 17 such as ace-6 rather than standing on it, and stands only on hard 17 or any 18 and up. It costs the player about a fifth of a percent, because it lets the dealer improve a weak 17 into a winner. Tables normally state which rule applies in print on the felt: "dealer must stand on all 17s" or "dealer hits soft 17".

6 to 5 blackjack — The natural pays 6 to 5 instead of the traditional 3 to 2, so a 10-chip bet wins 12 rather than 15. It looks like a small change and is not: it adds roughly 1.4 percent to the house edge, which is more than every other rule on the table combined. Often paired with a single deck to make the game look generous. Check the payout before you sit down.

Late surrender — You may fold a bad hand before drawing to it and lose only half your bet, once the dealer has confirmed they do not have a natural. It is mainly used on hard 16 against a dealer 9, 10 or ace, and on hard 15 against a 10. One account reports fewer and fewer casinos offering it at all, and it is often not signposted where it does exist, so ask the dealer.

Rotating banker at home — Rather than appointing one permanent dealer, pass the deal around the table so everyone takes the house side in turn, either after each hand or after each shuffle. Whoever holds the deal is the banker and covers all bets from their own stack, so agree a table maximum they can actually pay. Rotating matters because the dealer side carries a real edge over a session; leaving it with one person all night is not a fair game.

Pontoon — The British relative of the game, and a genuinely different animal. Every hand at the table is dealt face down, the banker's included, hitting is called twisting, standing is sticking, and you may instead buy a card by increasing your stake. You cannot stick below 15. Five cards totalling 21 or less is a five-card trick and beats everything except a pontoon, the ace plus ten-value hand; both pay 2 to 1. The dealer wins all ties, so there is no push.

• betting
• classic
• counting
• luck
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Wizard of Odds, Vegas Aces, Casino.org, PokerNews, BetMGM Casino Blog, Denexa Games.

Briscola

Also known as Briscula, Briškula

Players

2-6 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck stripped to 40 cards (A, K, Q, J, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 in each suit)

Time

15-30 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Briscola runs on forty cards. An Italian pack of coins, cups, swords and batons is ready to go as it comes; with an ordinary pack, discard the jokers and every eight, nine and ten, and you are left with exactly the same game in familiar pips. The Italian court of king, horse and jack maps onto king, queen and jack, which is the northern convention and the one most books print; many players in the south swap the last two over, making the jack the three-point card and the queen the two-point one. Settle which before you deal, because it is worth a point either way.

Deal and play both run counter-clockwise, so cards go out to the dealer's right and the deal itself moves right after every hand. Settle the first dealer any way you like; nothing in the game turns on it. Four players is the classic form, partners facing each other across the table; two is the form everyone learns on.

Give three cards to each player, one at a time, starting with the player on the dealer's right. What comes off the pack next is a single card, played face up on the table; the undealt remainder then goes down on top of it at an angle, squared enough to serve as a stock but leaving an edge of that one card on show all deal long. Its suit is the briscola, trump for the whole hand, and since everything else has been stacked over it, it is also the card that will be drawn last of all.

What has to be learned before the first trick is that the ranking follows the money rather than the pips. Only aces, threes and the three court cards carry any value at all, the pack holds 120 points between them, and 84 of those points sit in the four aces and the four threes alone. Those eight cards decide most hands, which is why they also sit at the top of the order.

Each side keeps its won tricks in a face-down pile and leaves them alone until the deal is over. Nobody counts aloud during play.

Play

The player on the dealer's right leads to the first trick, and thereafter whoever won the last trick leads to the next.

Then comes the rule that makes Briscola what it is: there is no obligation to follow suit, ever. Whatever is led, you may answer with any card in your hand. Nobody is ever squeezed into throwing away a good card, so every trick is a free choice between spending a counter and hoarding it.

A trick is won by the highest trump played to it. With no trump in it, the trick falls to whoever played highest in whatever suit was led, and cards of the two or three suits that are neither trump nor the led suit cannot win it no matter how high they rank — a discarded ace off-suit takes nothing and gives away eleven points to whoever does win. The winner turns the trick face down onto their pile.

Drawing keeps hands at three. A completed trick is followed by a round of replenishment, one card to everybody: it opens with whoever took the trick and travels counter-clockwise from there. Every player count that uses a stock divides the remainder evenly, so no round of drawing runs dry partway through and nobody is left a card short. It is that final round which strips the pile down to the exposed trump, so the trump card falls to whoever sits last in the drawing order — with two players, the one who has just lost the trick. From then on nothing is replaced, so every deal ends with three drawless tricks in which the whole remaining pack is, in principle, knowable. Counting what has already gone is where the game stops being luck.

The hand ends when everybody has run out of cards.

Partnerships. Most tables let partners help each other along in one of two ways, and the first trick is played in silence under either. One way is an agreed set of facial signals — segni — flashed when the opponents are not looking, each standing for one high trump: lips stretched over the teeth for the ace, the mouth pulled to one side for the three, a glance upward for the king, the tip of the tongue for the horse, a shrugged shoulder for the jack. The other, reported around Rome, is a limited vocabulary of questions and orders belonging to whoever leads the trick: you may ask a partner whether they hold low trumps, whether they hold high ones, whether they hold an ace or three outside trumps, or whether they can take the trick without trumping, and you may instruct them to do any of those things. What you may not ask about is the ace or the three of trumps themselves. Some groups allow neither, so decide before the first deal which kind of table you are at.

At five players the arithmetic stops working and the game turns into a different one, in which the whole pack is dealt out, there is no stock, and the trump suit is settled by auction.

Goal & scoring

The object is to capture point cards in tricks. When the last trick is over, each side gathers everything it won and adds up the values, and the totals must come to 120 between them — if they do not, a card has gone astray and the count has to be done again. That figure holds at three and six players as well, because the twos pulled out to make the pack divide are worth nothing.

Sixty-one takes the deal. There is no bonus for taking more, and the winner of a deal wins it exactly as much with 61 as with 120. A dead-level 60 apiece is a draw and neither side gets anything for it.

One deal is a short game, so tables usually play a match: best of three deals, or best of five, with a drawn deal counted to nobody and replayed. Some groups instead keep a running tally of deals won and stop at an agreed figure. At three players, where there are no partnerships, the highest of the three totals takes the deal — 61 is not needed and often not reached, since the same 120 is split three ways. One published scheme scores the three-handed game differently again, awarding a game point to each player who passes 40, two if only one player manages it, and three for taking all 120.

Because at two, four and six players 61 is the only threshold, the endgame is not about squeezing out extra points but about knowing when you are already safe. Once your pile is past 60 you can afford to throw the rest away, and a good player who is behind will hold aces back rather than spend them on tricks that do not close the gap.

Variants

Briscola Chiamata — The five-handed game, also met as Briscola Bastarda, Briscola Assassina or Briscolone. All forty cards are dealt out, eight each, with no stock and no turned trump. The auction is for the right to call a partner, and it runs downwards: bidders name a rank only and never a suit, each bid must be lower than the last, and the auction goes to whoever will settle for the weakest partner. The winner then names the trump suit, and whoever holds the called card in that suit is their partner — silently, so for the first few tricks nobody is sure who they are helping. Bidding as far down as the two turns the auction into a points auction instead, each bid promising more than the last. The caller's side must take 61 card points, or whatever higher figure was bid; the other three win by holding them to 60. A caller who names a card in their own hand plays alone against four, and wins or loses double for it.

Briscola Scoperta — Open Briscola. Every hand is dealt face up and the stock is turned so that the next card to be drawn is visible too. All the hidden information disappears and the game becomes a pure calculation exercise, which makes it excellent for teaching a beginner what the discards are actually costing them.

Briscolone — A two-handed version with five-card hands instead of three and no trump suit at all, so a trick always goes to the higher card of the suit led. Losing the trump removes the game's escape hatch: an ace led is safe, and there is no way to steal a fat trick with a low card of a favoured suit. One deal does not settle it — play runs on to a cumulative 121 or 151 card points — and it is commonly played with an obligation the parent game never imposes, that you must follow suit when you can. A three-card version of the same idea goes further and makes you head the trick as well, for the three tricks after the stock has gone. Confusingly the name is also used in places for the five-handed calling game.

Brisca (Spain) — Brisca is the same game in Spain and runs the same way, including the freedom to throw whatever you like: heading the trick is no more obligatory there than it is in Italy. Two rules of its own are worth knowing. The exposed trump card can be bought — a player who has won at least one trick and holds the seven of trumps may swap it for the turned card if that card is higher than a seven, or the two if it is a seven or lower, at any time before the last draw. And a player holding the ace of trumps may play it and declare arrastro, which obliges everyone still to play to that trick to put down the best card they hold, trump suit first. Argentina's brisca porteña drops the free play altogether and requires following, trumping and overtrumping throughout, which makes it a noticeably different game from the one described above.

No signals at all — Some groups play the partnership game with no communication of any kind: no signs, no questions, no comment on the trick in progress, and the only information crossing the table is which cards get played and when. Chile's brisca is played this way as a matter of course. Groups used to signalling find the partnership game much harder without them, since a lead has to carry the whole message on its own.

• classic
• counting
• family-friendly
• partnership
• quick
• strategy
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Board Game Arena, Denexa Games, Gambiter, Official Game Rules.

BS

Also known as Cheat, I Doubt It, Bullshit, Doubt It

Players

2-10 players (best with 5)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed; 2 decks shuffled together for five or more players

Time

15-30 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Bluffing

Setup

Take the jokers out. One pack does for four players or fewer; from five up, most tables shuffle two together, which doubles the number of each rank in play and so changes what a large claim means.

Two can play, but the game is thin at that size: with only one opponent you know exactly where every card you do not hold must be, and there is almost nothing to hide. Four to six is where it works.

Pick a dealer any way you like; the deal passes to the left afterwards. Deal the entire pack out one card at a time, clockwise, until nothing is left. Hands will not come out even unless the player count divides into 52, and that is fine: a one-card difference has no effect. With four players everyone starts with thirteen.

Pick your cards up and sort them by rank. You want to be able to see at a glance how many of each rank you hold, because the whole game is a running calculation of what you can honestly play and what you will have to fake.

Leave the middle of the table clear for the discard pile. It starts empty and can grow to most of the deck.

The player to the dealer's left goes first and must claim aces; some accounts simply pick the first player at random. Play runs clockwise.

Play

Ranks are claimed in a fixed ascending cycle: ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, king, then back to ace and around again. The cycle belongs to the table, not to any player. Whatever rank the previous player claimed, you claim the next one up.

On your turn, put anything from one card upwards face down on the pile and say aloud how many and of what rank — "two nines", say. The rank is dictated by the sequence. The number is up to you, and so is whether the cards are actually what you said. You may play any cards you like under any claim.

You must play at least one card. You cannot pass and you cannot play zero. This is the engine of the game: sooner or later the sequence reaches a rank you hold none of, and you have to lie.

Nothing in the rules caps the number, but the pack does the capping for you: with one deck there are four of each rank and with two there are eight, so a claim of five in a single-deck game is not against the rules — it is simply a lie nobody has to think about.

Once your cards are down, any other player may challenge by calling "BS!" (or "Cheat!" or "I doubt it!"). The window stays open until the next player's cards hit the table, at which point the claim stands for good. Only one challenge is ever resolved, and it is the earliest one. Two people calling half a second apart is settled by ear, and for a genuine dead heat no published rule set offers a ruling at all, so agree a tie-break before you deal rather than during one.

A challenge is resolved by turning over only the cards that were just played, not the whole pile:

• If every one of them matches the claimed rank, the claim was honest and the challenger was wrong. The challenger takes the pile.
• If even one card is not the claimed rank, the player who played them takes the pile.

"The pile" means every card in the middle, including the cards that were just turned face up, and all of it goes into the losing player's hand. The rest of the pile is never exposed, so only the cards from the challenged play become public knowledge — though some groups turn the whole pile face up instead, which tells everyone who has been lying and for how long.

Either way the pile is now gone from the table and the next player starts a fresh pile. Picking up does not cost you anything else, and it does not skip anyone.

A challenge does not reset the rank cycle and does not change whose turn is next. Play carries on with the player to the left of whoever just played, claiming the next rank up, no matter who ended up with the pile. If the last claim was eights, the next claim is nines even if the eights turned out to be garbage and their owner is now holding twenty cards.

If nobody challenges, nothing is revealed. The cards stay face down on the pile and their true identity is never learned, which is exactly what makes the game work: a successful lie is invisible.

Going out has one wrinkle. Playing your last cards does not finish you immediately; you are only out once the challenge window has closed. If someone calls BS on your final play and you were lying, you take the pile and you are back in the game with a fistful of cards. If you were telling the truth, the challenger takes the pile and you have won. If nobody calls, you are out and the game ends there.

Goal & scoring

You are trying to empty your hand. Get the last card down and survive whatever challenge it draws, and the game is yours.

There is no point scoring at all. A game is a single deal and takes as long as it takes.

Many groups do not stop at the winner. Once someone is out, the rest keep going and note the order in which they finish; whoever is left with the only unplayed hand at the end takes last place. Anyone who has already finished is passed over on later circuits, and the rank sequence continues from wherever the last claim left it rather than starting over. Ranking the whole table this way keeps the people still in it invested after the first person leaves, and it turns second-to-last into an outcome worth chasing rather than a consolation.

A few practical points that decide games. Lie small: claiming one card is far less suspicious than claiming four, and it also costs you less to be caught early when the pile is short. Watch the pile size, because a challenge is only worth making when the pile is small or when you are certain. And count: if you hold three queens yourself, anyone claiming three queens is caught before they finish the sentence.

Variants

Free choice of rank (Bluff) — Instead of a fixed ascending cycle, the player who starts a pile names any rank they like, and every player after them must claim that same rank until a challenge happens. Whoever ends up taking the pile starts the next one with a rank of their own choosing. This removes the forced-lie pressure of the ascending version, since you can open on a rank you actually hold, but it makes reading other players harder because nobody is ever obliged to lie. This is the version usually meant by the names Bluff and I Doubt It in older books.

Restricted challenge window — Rules differ on who may call and for how long, and no published account settles it. One version lets any player call until the next player's cards touch the pile. A tighter house rule allows only the player to the immediate left of the one who played, which keeps the game fast and stops the whole table ganging up. A looser one lets anyone call at any point before the pile is next collected, so a claim can be caught several turns later. Settle this before dealing; it is the single most argued-about rule in the game.

Lying about the count — Some groups let you cheat on the number as well as the rank — say "three eights" while putting down three eights and a jack, and hope nobody counts. It is challenged in the ordinary way and caught in the ordinary way, but it turns every claim into two things to check rather than one, and it makes a fast, confident delivery worth a great deal more.

Downward and either-way sequences — The ascending cycle is not the only one in print. Some tables run it downward instead, opening on aces and going A, K, Q, J and on down. Others let each player choose the next rank either above or below the last call, and some add the option of repeating the same rank, which gives three choices a turn. Every loosening of the sequence makes honest play easier and lies correspondingly rarer, and each one kills the standard tactic of counting ahead to work out which rank is about to land on you.

Two-pack table — For five or more players, shuffle two 52-card packs together. Everyone still gets roughly the same hand size, but each rank now has eight copies, so a claim of five or six is no longer self-evidently false and the arithmetic of catching a liar changes completely. Holding three of a rank no longer proves much. Piles grow much larger, which makes getting caught genuinely punishing.

• beginner-friendly
• bluffing
• classic
• family-friendly
• large-group
• party
• quick

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Official Game Rules, Game Rules, Denexa Games, PlayingCardDecks, Gambiter.

Canasta

Also known as Classic Canasta

Players

2-4 players (best with 4)

Deck

2 standard decks plus 4 jokers (108 cards)

Time

60-120 minutes

Difficulty

Complex

Category

Rummy family

Setup

Four players, paired off across the table and staying paired all game. Shuffle two full 52-card decks together with four jokers: 108 cards. Cut for seats and first deal if you want a formal start, high card choosing; after that the deal passes clockwise each hand.

Deal 11 cards to each player, one at a time. Set the remaining cards face down in the middle as the stock and turn its top card face up beside it to begin the discard pile. If that upcard is a joker, a two, or a red three, turn another card on top of it and keep going until an ordinary card is showing. When that happens the pile starts the hand frozen; leave the wild card or red three sticking out crossways so everyone can see it stays frozen.

Before the first turn, every player puts any red threes from their dealt hand face up on the table in front of them and draws one replacement card from the stock for each, repeating if a replacement is itself a red three. The player to the dealer's left plays first.

Melds belong to the partnership, not the player, so keep them all in one group in front of one partner where both of you can reach them. Score is kept per partnership across as many deals as the game takes.

Play

Play goes clockwise, and a turn has three parts: take cards, meld if you want to, then throw one card onto the discard pile to close it. Melding is optional; taking and discarding are not.

Taking cards. Either draw the top card of the stock, or take the whole discard pile when you are entitled to. If you ever draw a red three, lay it down face up at once and draw another card to replace it.

Melds. A meld is a rank collected three deep or more, anything from a four up to an ace, with suits playing no part. Jokers and twos are wild and may be included, but a meld must always hold at least two natural cards and may never hold more than three wild cards. There are no sequences in Canasta. Your side may have only one meld of any given rank, so instead of starting a second you add to the one already on the table; either partner may add to any of the side's melds at any time. Cards on the table stay there and cannot be taken back into hand.

Threes. Red threes are never melded or held in hand; they sit face up in front of you doing nothing but scoring. Black threes may be melded only on the turn you go out, and only as a natural set of three or four with no wild card among them.

The first meld. Neither partner may put anything down until the side lays out melds whose card points reach a minimum set by their score at the start of the deal: 15 points if the score is below zero, 50 from 0 to 1,495, 90 from 1,500 to 2,995, and 120 at 3,000 or above. The whole requirement must be satisfied in one turn, and only the face value of the cards counts toward it. Red threes, canasta bonuses, and the going-out bonus do not help. If you make the initial meld while taking the discard pile, the top card counts but the buried cards do not.

Taking the discard pile. You must use the top card immediately in a meld, and you always take the entire pile, never part of it. If the pile is not frozen against you there are two ways in: meld the top card with two cards of that rank out of your hand, either two natural cards or one natural card plus a wild card, or add the top card to a meld your side already has on the table. If the pile is frozen against you the second route is closed and a wild card is no help in the first: you need two natural cards of the top card's rank in your hand, and you meld all three together. The pile is frozen for everyone once a wild card or red three lies buried in it, it is frozen against any side that has not yet made its initial meld, and it starts frozen if the first upcard was a wild card or red three. A frozen pile stays frozen until somebody takes it.

Black threes. A black three thrown on the pile puts it out of reach of the player who follows, whatever they hold; the block lifts after that one turn and does not freeze the pile.

Canastas. Seven cards of one rank, or more, makes a canasta. Square it up and mark it with a red card on top if it is natural (no wilds) or a black card if it is mixed. You may keep adding cards afterwards, but laying a wild card on a natural canasta turns it into a mixed one.

Going out. You go out when you play the last card from your hand, whether as a discard, a new meld, or an addition to an existing one; finishing with a meld and no discard is allowed. Your side must have completed at least one canasta first. Before you touch anything on your turn you are allowed one question across the table — "may I go out?" — and whichever answer comes back binds you. Once you have melded or reached for the pile, you have given up the right to ask.

If your side has not melded yet and you draw from the stock into a hand you can lay down complete, canasta included, you may go out concealed on the spot without meeting the minimum count. Take the pile instead of drawing and that concession disappears: you must make the minimum, and the concealed bonus is not yours to claim.

When the stock runs out. If the last stock card is a red three, the player shows it and the hand ends immediately with no discard. Otherwise play carries on with no stock to draw from, so the discard pile is the only source of cards. Taking it is now compulsory rather than optional: if the top card can be added to one of your side's melds and the pile is not frozen against you, you must take the pile, meld, and discard as usual. You may still take it by the ordinary two-cards-from-hand route if that is open to you, but only the add-to-a-meld case is forced. The moment a player has no legal way to take the pile, the hand stops there: nobody goes out, no going-out bonus is scored, and the deal is counted as it stands.

Goal & scoring

The partnership target is 5,000 points, played out over as many deals as it takes. Each deal is scored for the side as a whole.

Every card carries a point value fixed by its rank, wild cards counting for most and the low cards for least. Add up everything your side has melded and subtract the value of every card still in either partner's hand.

Bonuses: 500 for each natural canasta, 300 for each mixed canasta, and 100 for going out. Going out concealed is worth 200 instead: you lay your whole hand down in one turn, canasta included, having put nothing on the table earlier in the deal, neither a meld of your own nor an addition to your partner's. Your partner may already have melds down; some rule sets are stricter and require the whole side to have stayed off the table.

Red threes count 100 each for the side that laid them down, but only if that side made its initial meld; a side that never melded has the same 100 per red three deducted. Holding all four doubles it to 800 for or 800 against.

A deal can easily come out negative. Add each deal to the running total, since that total sets the next deal's minimum meld. The game ends when a side reaches 5,000 or more once a deal has been fully scored; if both sides cross 5,000 in the same deal, the higher total wins, and if the two totals are level as well, play one more deal to break the tie.

Variants

Two- and three-player Canasta — With two players, each is dealt 15 cards, a stock draw takes two cards rather than one (you still discard only one), everyone plays alone, and you need two canastas to go out. With three, deal 13 cards each and again play as individuals with the standard one-canasta requirement. Everything else follows the four-hand game.

Samba — Three decks and six jokers, 162 cards, usually four players in two partnerships, dealt 15 each. Alongside ordinary rank melds you may build sequences in a single suit running anywhere from the four up to the ace; a sequence of seven is a samba, counts as a canasta for going out, and scores 1,500. Sequences never accept wild cards, and ordinary melds are held to two wild cards rather than three. Stock draws take two cards, going out needs two canastas, and the game runs to 10,000 with the initial meld minimum climbing to 150 once a side passes 7,000.

Hand and Foot — The most popular North American descendant, usually four to six decks with jokers. Each player gets two packets of equal size, most often eleven cards each though thirteen is just as widely played; you play the hand first and only pick up the foot after emptying it. Melds are built toward books of seven, clean (no wilds) or dirty (with wilds), and going out typically demands a set quota of each, so a partnership cannot finish early on a thin table.

Modern American Canasta — The version most tournament and club play now uses. Nothing from the discard pile may go towards the opening meld — it comes out of the hand and nowhere else — and a partnership needs two canastas rather than one before it may go out. Wild cards may be gathered into a meld of their own: a canasta of seven wild cards pays a bonus far larger than a natural one, most published rule sets putting it at 1,000, and an unfinished pile of wilds is penalised at the end of the deal instead. A rank whose remaining copies are all buried or already melded elsewhere can no longer reach seven cards and is treated as dead, which changes what is safe to throw. League rule sets differ on the exact bonus figures, so check whose rules the table is using.

• classic
• counting
• long-game
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, Hoyle's Rules of Games, Canasta League of America, GameRules.com.

Canfield

Also known as Demon, Demon Patience

Players

1 player

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed

Time

10-25 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Solitaire (1 player)

Setup

Before anything else, the name. In North America this game is Canfield and Klondike is Klondike; in older British books Canfield is the name given to Klondike, and this game is Demon Patience. Two respectable traditions, two incompatible answers, and the confusion goes back to a single 1908 collection that printed both games, its rules headed Canfield describing what is now called Klondike. Go by the layout below rather than by whatever is printed at the top of the page you are reading.

Count out thirteen cards face down in a column and turn the last of them face up. That column is the reserve, and it is the demon: everything difficult about the game lives in those thirteen cards, which you cannot see and cannot get at except one at a time from the top.

Turn the next card and set it above and to the right. Whatever rank it happens to be is the base rank, and it decides the shape of the whole game — all four foundations must begin on that rank, so if it is a nine you are looking for the other three nines before anything else can start.

Lay four cards face up in a row beneath the space kept for the foundations. That is the tableau, and four columns is all you get. The remaining thirty-four cards are the stock.

There is nothing else to arrange and nobody to wait for.

Play

Foundations go upwards in suit from the base rank and turn the corner at the top: after the king comes the ace, then the two, and each pile finishes on the rank just below the one it started from. Tableau columns go downwards in alternating colours and turn the corner at the bottom, so a king may be laid on an ace.

What may be moved where:

• The face-up card at the foot of the reserve is available at all times, to a foundation or to a tableau column.
• The top card of the waste is available in the same way.
• From a tableau column you may take the top card by itself, or lift the entire column and set it down as a unit. What you may never do is split a column and move part of it. This is the rule that separates Canfield from Klondike, and forgetting it makes the game look far more generous than it is.
• Whether a card already banked on a foundation may be brought back down to the tableau is a thing rule sets differ over, so settle it before you start. Where it is allowed it is worth doing when it unblocks something, and worth thinking about first, since it cannot be done twice in a row to any effect.

Empty a tableau column and the reserve refills it — not any card you like, the next card off the reserve. Emptying columns is therefore the only way to dig through the demon, and it is the engine of the whole game rather than a side effect of it. Once the reserve is finally exhausted, a gap is filled from the waste instead, and at your own choosing rather than automatically; at that point the position usually opens up all at once.

When nothing else will move, deal three cards face up from the stock to the waste and try again with whatever is now on top. Take the waste through as many times as you like: the stock is turned over and dealt again without limit, so the game only ends when a full pass produces no move at all.

One piece of technique is worth knowing before the first deal, because it is less a trick than the way the game is meant to be played. There are two hidden places on the table and only one of them stays hidden. Whatever is not in the thirty-four cards the stock will show you, and not already face up, is in the reserve — so a single pass through the stock before you move anything tells you which thirteen cards the demon is holding, missing base cards included. What it cannot tell you is the order they sit in, and that stays hidden to the end. What using the waste costs is position: every card taken off it shifts the rest back by one on the following pass, which is occasionally a tool and more often the reason a card you were counting on fails to come round.

Goal & scoring

All fifty-two cards onto the foundations. Nothing else counts as a win, and most deals do not produce one.

How often is worth stating carefully, because the answer depends less on the game than on who is playing it and how much of it they can see. A solver that can see every card and never errs gets home on roughly 71 percent of deals. Very strong human play, with the reserve genuinely hidden and each waste-pile decision reshuffling everything behind it, is credited with something nearer 35. Ordinary play comes in far below that again, and no figure for it is firmly established — general-audience accounts quote numbers as low as three percent — so treat any single percentage for casual play as describing its own sample rather than the game. The gap between the first number and the last is not a measure of how hard the game is; it is a measure of how much of it is played blind.

So count cards banked rather than games won. Around forty of the fifty-two is what the solver gets home on an average deal, which makes it a target rather than an expectation, and getting all four foundations open at all is a decent afternoon's result on a bad deal.

The historical scoring is the gambling version the game is named after, and you can play it against yourself with a notepad. A pack costs fifty by most accounts and fifty-two by others, each card you get onto a foundation pays five, and so ten or eleven cards is break-even and anything above that is profit. Richard Canfield ran it at his Saratoga Springs casino from about 1900, one croupier per player, and the players lost steadily — as anyone who has tried to bank ten cards from a cold deal would expect. It did not last. He sold the place in 1907, and historians of the game now suspect that what he actually dealt was Klondike, which would make this the one card game named for a gambler who dealt something else.

Variants

Storehouse — Also called Reserve or Thirteen Up, and much the kindest member of the family. Take the four twos out before dealing and set them up as the foundations, so the base rank is fixed and all four piles are open from the first move — which removes the thing that strangles most Canfield deals. Foundations build up in suit as usual, but the tableau builds down in suit too rather than by alternating colours. The stock turns one card at a time and may be run through only twice. Its ceiling is lower than Canfield's at around 44 percent winnable, and yet ordinary players win close to that, which tells you most of what you need to know about where Canfield's difficulty actually comes from.

Rainbow — Canfield with the colour rule dropped: tableau columns build down by rank alone and suit is ignored entirely. To pay for that the stock is turned one card at a time and redeals are limited, commonly to none at all or to two. It is the version to reach for when a game keeps dying on a tableau full of same-coloured cards, and the single-card turn makes the waste pile far easier to plan around.

Selective Canfield — Deal the reserve, then turn five cards instead of four. Choose whichever of the five you want as the base card and lay the other four out as the tableau. Everything afterwards is ordinary Canfield. One choice, made before a single card has moved, and it is a real one: a base rank near the middle leaves you tableau space above and below it, while a base of two or a base of king means half the pack has nowhere useful to go.

Superior Canfield — Two rules relaxed at once. The whole reserve is spread face up so you can see all thirteen cards from the start, and an empty tableau column may be filled with any available card rather than only from the reserve. Together they turn the game from a blind one into a puzzle, which is either the point or a betrayal of it depending on why you sat down. It is the closest thing in the family to playing Canfield with the solver's information.

Double-pack Canfield — Two packs shuffled together and five tableau columns rather than four. The form the books describe goes under the name Variegated Demon: the base rank is fixed at the ace instead of being dealt for, single cards or whole sequences may be moved between columns rather than only entire columns, and two redeals are allowed. With two of every card a rank you need is rarely stuck in one place, and the extra column gives the alternating-colour build somewhere to go, so it is a reasonable answer for anyone who likes the shape of Canfield and has grown tired of losing to it.

• classic
• luck
• solo
• strategy
• travel

Rules checked against Wikipedia, GameRules.com, Solitaired, Solitaire-Play.

Caribbean Stud

Also known as Caribbean Stud Poker, Casino Stud Poker

Players

2-7 players (best with 5)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), plus chips or counters

Time

20-60 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Casino

Setup

Poker hands, ranked the usual way, played against the dealer rather than against each other. That last part removes the thing most poker is about: there is nobody to bluff, because the dealer never makes a decision. What is left is a bet on your own five cards against a hand that follows a fixed rule.

One player deals and banks. In a casino that seat belongs to the house; at a kitchen table give it to whoever can cover the payouts, and pass it on before the evening turns into a very slow transfer of somebody's money.

Each player who wants a hand puts up an ante before the deal. Where a jackpot stake is being offered, that goes down at the same time and is settled entirely separately — see the variants.

The dealer gives five cards face down to each player and five to themselves, then turns one of their own face up. That single exposed card is all you learn about the hand you are up against, and it is the whole of what you have to work with.

Players look at their own cards, and everyone at the table is up against the same single dealer hand. That is worth noticing before the first deal: cards compared around the table would tell everybody something about what the dealer cannot be holding, which is information the game is not built to survive. Casinos have their own rules about it; a home table should agree its own, and the simplest is that you play your own five cards and say nothing about them.

Play

One decision each, made after looking at your five cards and the dealer's single upcard.

• Raise. Put up a second stake of exactly twice your ante. There is no other amount, and this is the only bet you will make.
• Fold. Give the hand up and lose the ante.

Everyone decides in turn, and the decision is final. There is no drawing, no second round of betting and nothing to do afterwards; the rest of the hand is settlement.

Once every player has raised or folded, the dealer turns their remaining four cards face up. Now the qualifier decides everything that follows: THE DEALER'S HAND ONLY PLAYS IF IT CONTAINS AN ACE AND A KING, OR IS A PAIR OR BETTER.

IF THE DEALER DOES NOT QUALIFY

Cards are not compared. Every player still in is paid even money on the ante, and the raise — twice the size — is handed straight back. It does not matter whether your hand was a royal flush or the worst five cards at the table: the raise wins nothing, which is the sting in the game and the reason a huge hand can feel wasted.

IF THE DEALER QUALIFIES

Each remaining player's five cards are compared with the dealer's, on the standard poker rankings.

• Your hand is better. The ante is paid even money, and the raise is paid at the ladder below — which is where the game's money is, since it climbs to a hundred to one.
• The dealer's hand is better. Both stakes are lost.
• The two are exactly equal. Both stakes are returned and nothing changes hands.

A casino usually caps what one hand can pay however the ladder works out, so a big hand at high stakes can be worth less than the multiplier suggests. At home there is no cap unless the banker sets one, and a banker who does not think about that before dealing has agreed to a liability they have not counted.

Goal & scoring

Take more from the banker than you put in. Hands are settled one at a time and there is no running total; what is in front of you is the score.

Every hand resolves through the same two questions, in this order: did the dealer qualify, and if so, whose five cards are better. The first question is the one that shapes how the game feels, because whenever the dealer cannot qualify the raise — the bigger of your two stakes — is dead money that comes straight back untouched. Holding four of a kind against a dealer who cannot show ace-king pays you your ante and nothing else.

That is also why the fold decision is not the one it looks like. Folding costs the ante; raising costs twice the ante on top. The usual guidance is to raise on any pair or better and fold below ace-king, which is roughly where the raise stops being worth its price. A table-ready version of the fuller strategy is to call with ace-king-jack-eight-three or better, which gives away a further tenth of a per cent against playing it perfectly.

When the dealer does qualify, the ante pays even money and the raise pays on the ladder above. A pair is worth the same as a high card there — the ladder only starts climbing at two pair — and it climbs steeply at the top, which is what people remember about the game and not what pays for most of their evening.

The rankings are standard five-card poker throughout, so a straight beats three of a kind, a flush beats a straight, and suits break nothing. Two identical hands are a tie and both stakes come back.

The house edge is real and it lives in the qualifier: play as well as the game can be played and it still costs about 2.6 per cent of everything staked. Two figures get quoted for this game and they are both true — that one measures against the ante and the raise together, while the larger number you will see elsewhere measures against the ante alone, which is the smaller of the two stakes. Neither moves much whatever you do with the cards. A jackpot stake is worse again unless the meter has grown very large. Whoever banks the game at home is being handed that edge, which is a reason to rotate the seat rather than to argue about who gets it.

Variants

The progressive jackpot — A separate fixed stake, put down with the ante, that pays on the strength of your own five cards alone — it takes no notice of the dealer, the qualifier, or whether you folded. A flush or better pays, with the smaller hands paying set amounts and a straight flush usually taking a share of a running meter and a royal flush the lot. It is the worst bet on the table by some distance until the meter has grown enormous, and it is the reason the game is offered.

Playing it at home without a house — The banker holds a real edge here, so rotate the seat every few hands or the evening has a foregone conclusion. Set a cap on what a single hand can pay before dealing — a hundred to one on a raise is a serious liability at any stake worth playing for — and agree it out loud. Dropping the qualifier makes the game close to even and rather duller; halving the raise to one ante instead of two is the gentler adjustment.

The stud game it borrows from — Traditional stud poker is a different animal: cards are dealt one at a time, most of them face up, with a betting round after each, and every player is playing against the others rather than against a bank. Bluffing exists there because the opponents make decisions and can be made to regret them. Seven Card Stud is in this collection and is the closest relative here.

• beginner-friendly
• betting
• large-group
• luck

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia.

Casino

Also known as Cassino

Players

2-4 players (best with 2)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards)

Time

20-40 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Matching & collecting

Setup

Two to four players and one standard 52-card deck. Despite the name, nothing is bet and nobody banks: this is a fishing game, where you catch cards off the table with cards from your hand. It plays best head to head. With four, partners sit opposite each other and pool their captures; with three, everyone plays alone.

Pick a first dealer however you like — low card on a cut is the usual method — and pass the deal to the left after each round.

Deal in twos. Two cards to each player, then two face up to the middle, then two more to each player and two more face up. Everyone ends up holding four cards, with four lying face up in the centre. Put the rest of the deck face down beside the dealer. It is used to top hands up later; no further cards are ever added to the table.

Card values in play: an ace is 1 and numeral cards are worth their pips, which includes the two of spades counting 2 and the ten of diamonds counting 10, regardless of what they are worth at scoring time. Jacks, queens and kings have no numeric value and never take part in any addition.

Each player (or partnership) keeps captured cards in a face-down pile, out of play until the round is scored. The player to the dealer's left starts.

Play

A turn is a single card, laid face up, and it has to do one of three things: capture, build, or trail. Then play passes to the left. Never more than one card, never fewer.

Capturing. Put your card down and take the table cards it wins, adding them and it to your capture pile.

• By rank: any table card matching what you just laid down. A numeral card takes every match at once, so a 7 collects both 7s if two are showing. A face card takes only one matching face card per turn, even when two or three of its rank are sitting there.
• By sum: any group of numeral table cards whose values add up to your card. A 9 can lift a 4 and a 5, or an ace, a 3 and a 5. Face cards can never be part of a sum.
• Several at once: a single card may take a matching rank, one or more separate summing groups, and any build worth that number, all in the same turn. A 9 could take a loose 9, a 6 with a 3, and a build of nine together.

You are never obliged to take everything on offer. Take whichever legal captures you want.

Building. Lay a card onto one or more table cards, push the lot together into a pile, and announce what it is now worth: "building eight." You must keep a card in hand capable of capturing that number, and you may not build using only cards already on the table.

A single build is one combination adding to the announced number, such as a 3 and a 5 built to eight. Any player holding the right card may capture it, and a single build may be raised by adding one card from hand — laying an ace on a build of eight and announcing nine takes it over, so long as whoever announces nine holds a nine. Raising an opponent's build is legal everywhere. Raising your own is allowed here too — you may add to a build you already own, so long as you still hold a card matching the new number — but some rule sets bar it outright, Royal Casino among them, so settle which you are playing before the first deal.

A multiple build is two or more separate groups worth the same number stacked together, for example an 8 from hand laid on a 5-and-3 build, still worth eight. Once a build is multiple its value is fixed; nobody may raise it, and only a card of that number takes it. Court cards can never go into a build.

You may not trail while a build stands on the table to which you played the most recent card. On such a turn you must capture, add to a build, or start another build — and one of those is always open to you, because the card that made your build legal in the first place is the card that captures it. Once an opponent has added to that build the restriction becomes theirs and not yours.

Trailing. When you cannot capture or build, or simply prefer not to, lay a card face up on the table by itself. It becomes a loose card that anyone may take. Trailing is legal even when a capture was there for the taking; the build rule above is the only thing that ever forces your hand.

Sweeps. A capture that clears the table completely is a sweep. Turn one card in your capture pile face up to record it. The player after a sweep faces an empty table and can only trail.

Refilling and the last trick. Once every hand is empty, four fresh cards go to each player out of the stock, two at a time, with nothing added to the middle. Play carries on the same way. The dealer is obliged to call "last" aloud as the final round goes out, and it is not a formality: play changes once there is nothing more to come. After the very last card is played, whoever made the most recent capture sweeps up whatever is still lying on the table — but that is not counted as a sweep. A real sweep made with the final card of the deal does count.

Goal & scoring

Casino is usually played to 21 points across several rounds. Eleven is the common short target, and some groups simply play one round for the points on offer and call it a game.

At the end of each round, sort your captured cards and score:

• 3 points for taking the most cards. A tie scores nobody: 26 apiece head to head, or any tie for the lead when three or four play separately.
• 1 point for taking the most spades. Thirteen is odd, so two sides can never tie it; three or four playing separately can, and then nobody scores it either.
• 2 points for big casino, the ten of diamonds.
• 1 point for little casino, the two of spades.
• 1 point for each ace, four in total.
• 1 point for each sweep.

That is 11 fixed points a round, plus however many sweeps were made.

If two players pass the target in the same round, the plain answer is that the higher total wins, and a dead tie means another round. Groups who would rather see the finish decided item by item count them in a fixed order instead — most cards, most spades, big casino, little casino, then the aces of spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds, and the sweeps last of all — and whoever reaches the target first in that sequence takes the game. If the aces have not settled it, the greater number of sweeps does; if those are level too, play a further round.

Variants

Royal Casino — Court cards get numeric values and join the arithmetic: jack 11, queen 12, king 13. They can be built, captured by sums, and used to capture combinations, which makes builds far more flexible. The ace is usually worth 1 or 14 at the discretion of whoever plays it. Everything else follows the standard game.

Spade Casino — The spade suit carries the scoring instead of a single point for holding most of it. Each spade you capture is worth a point on its own, the jack of spades scores an extra one, and the rest of the values are unchanged. Game is 61 and is normally pegged on a cribbage board as the points come in, since the totals move so much faster.

Draw Casino — A two-handed game in which the undealt cards stay as a face-down stock and you draw one after every play to keep your hand at four, so there are no separate deals and no announced last round. Once the stock is empty the hands in play are simply played out with no further draws, and as in the standard game whoever made the last capture takes any cards still lying on the table, without it counting as a sweep. It removes most of the counting advantage of the standard game, since you cannot track how many rounds remain.

Partnership Casino — The standard four-handed form: two teams of two, partners facing each other across the table, captures thrown into one shared pile and scored as a unit. A build made by one partner may be captured by the other, so builds become a way of passing information and setting your partner up rather than a private plan.

• classic
• counting
• family-friendly
• strategy
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Britannica, Hoyle's Rules of Games, Denexa Games, GameRules.com.

Clock

Also known as Clock Patience, Clock Solitaire, The Clock, Sundial

Players

1 player

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards)

Time

5-10 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Solitaire (1 player)

Setup

Shuffle a full 52-card deck and deal it into thirteen face-down piles of four without looking at anything. Dealing one card at a time and going round the layout four times is the tidy way to do it and keeps the piles honest.

Twelve of the piles form a ring in the positions of the numerals on a clock face, one at twelve o'clock, one at one o'clock, and so on round to eleven. The thirteenth pile sits in the middle of the ring. That centre pile belongs to the kings, and it is also where play starts.

Ranks map onto the hours the obvious way. An ace is one o'clock, each numeral card is its own number, the jack is eleven and the queen is twelve. Kings have no hour on a dial, so they go to the centre. Suit and colour never matter for anything.

As the game runs, every position grows a face-up group underneath its face-down packet, so leave each pile enough room for a spread below it. Nothing else is needed: no stock, no waste, no foundations.

Play

Turn the top card of the centre pile face up. After that the game runs itself.

Read whatever card is now in your hand as an address. An eight is addressed to eight o'clock, a jack to eleven o'clock, a king to the middle. Carry it there and tuck it face up beneath the face-down packet waiting at that position. The position pays you back on the spot: help yourself to its topmost face-down card, and that card becomes the one in your hand, to be read and delivered by exactly the same procedure. Each card names the pile you visit next, and the pile you visit hands you the next card, so the whole deal is one unbroken chain.

There is nothing to choose at any point. You never pick a destination, never pick which pile to open, and never decide when to turn. The chain is fixed by the shuffle from the first card onward, and two people dealt the same pack in the same order get the same result. This is why Clock is handed to children rather than played as a contest: nothing anywhere in it responds to skill.

The chain can only ever die at the centre. Every other pile hands you a replacement the moment you add a card to it, because it starts with four face-down cards and receives exactly four over the course of a deal. The centre is the exception: it gave up its first card for free at the very start, so it is running one turn ahead of its supply all game. Placing the fourth king therefore leaves nothing to turn and the deal stops on the spot, however many cards are still face down elsewhere. For the same reason a pile can never strand you by handing you a card of its own hour at the wrong moment, which is a worry beginners often have and never need to.

Watch the face-down packets thin out as you go, because that is the only feedback the game gives. If the ring is emptying evenly by the time the third king shows, the deal is alive. If two or three positions have never been visited at all, it is already lost and the remaining turns are just confirmation.

Goal & scoring

You win by turning every card in the layout, which happens exactly when the fourth king is the last card you turn up. At that moment all thirteen positions hold their four matching cards face up, the ring reads round in order from one to twelve, and the kings are in the middle where they belong.

You lose the moment the fourth king appears with any face-down card still on the table. There is no rescue and no redeal built into the game; you gather the cards, shuffle and start over.

The odds are fixed and well known. Since there are no decisions to make, the result is settled entirely by the shuffle, and the chance of a win works out at one deal in thirteen, a shade under eight per cent. Nothing you do changes that. If you want something to compare between deals, count the cards left face down when the fourth king turns up and treat fewer as better: a deal that stalls with three cards down was an unlucky shuffle, while one that stalls with thirty was never going anywhere.

Variants

Watch — The usual relief valve, met under this name and under none at all. The first time the fourth king comes up, you may set it aside and turn any face-down card still left in the layout instead, resuming the chain from there. One rescue per deal only. A game that was failing badly still fails, but the near misses, the deals that stall with a couple of cards to go, mostly come home. It adds no decision worth the name, since which card you pick makes no difference to whether the chain survives.

Play it out — Rather than stopping when the fourth king kills the chain, restart it and carry on until every card in the layout is face up. The first death is always in the centre but later ones can strand you anywhere, so fix the restart point by the dial rather than by where you stopped: go to one o'clock and turn its top face-down card, and if that position is already clear keep stepping clockwise until you reach one that is not. Restart as often as necessary, and score the deal by the number of restarts you needed, lowest best. The procedure is otherwise unchanged. It suits younger players, who tend to find the abrupt ending of the standard game unsatisfying, and it at least gives every deal a number rather than a flat loss.

Grandfather's Clock — A different game that borrows the dial, and the one to look for if the clock face is the appeal but pure luck is not. Twelve foundations are laid out as a clock face, each starting on a different card, and each is built upwards in suit, turning the corner from king to ace as needed, until its top card is the one matching its hour: an ace at one o'clock, a 10 at ten, the queen at twelve. The forty cards left over form eight tableau columns of five, built down regardless of suit and moved one card at a time. That is twelve plus forty, so the pack comes out exactly. Unlike Clock it involves genuine choices. Big Ben is the two-pack relative built on the same idea. Neither is a variant of this game in any real sense — they only borrow the dial.

Background

A nineteenth-century game, known then as The Clock and shortened since. It descends from an older European game called Wandering Card, and its defining trick — a card goes under a pile and the next card comes off the top of that same pile — has a name of its own, shuttling.

The name is a mess and worth a warning. Travellers, Hidden Cards and Four of a Kind are each offered somewhere as another name for it, and none of them is. Travellers and Hidden Cards are separate descendants of Wandering Card with their own layouts and their own shuttling rules, and Four of a Kind is a different mechanism altogether. Pulling the other way, several unrelated patiences are called Clock or The Clock — Big Ben, Grandfather's Clock, a member of the Simple Addition family, and a German stock-and-waste game published as Die Uhr that turns on skill rather than luck. If you are handed a game called Clock, check whether the kings go in the middle before assuming it is this one.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• kids
• luck
• quick
• solo

Rules checked against Wikipedia, GameRules.com, BVS Solitaire, Wolfram MathWorld, Cats at Cards, MobilityWare, Anytime Card Games, CardGames.io.

Concentration

Also known as Memory, Pelmanism, Pairs, Match Match, Pexeso, Shinkei-suijaku

Players

2-8 players (best with 3)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards)

Time

10-20 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Matching & collecting

Setup

Two or more can play, and the only real limit is the table everyone has to reach across and the patience of whoever is waiting for their next go. It suits young children particularly well, which is why it gets handed to them so often, but it is not only a children's game: played attentively it is hard work for an adult.

What you really need is a large flat surface, a table or the floor, because the layout is the game and a cramped one ruins it.

Shuffle a full 52-card pack thoroughly, then lay every card face down in four rows of thirteen. Leave a small gap on all sides of each card so that no card overlaps another and so that a card can be turned up and set back down in precisely the square it came from. A tidy grid is not decoration: everybody at the table is memorising positions, and a layout that drifts as it is played robs whoever has been paying the closest attention.

Settle what counts as a match before the first card is turned, because the published accounts do not agree on which rule is the ordinary one. This entry follows rank alone, so any two sixes go together and suit plays no part; one account gives that as the rule and rank-with-colour as the alternative, and the other gives it exactly the other way round. The stricter form is in the variants below. Neither is wrong, and a table that has not said which it means will find out halfway through.

Nothing obliges you to use all 52. For small children, take whole ranks out rather than odd cards, so that what is left still pairs off: the twos through the sevens alone give 24 cards in four rows of six. Choose a starting player however you like, and play moves to the left.

Play

On your turn, pick two cards from the layout and turn them face up where they lie, one after the other. Turn them so the whole table sees them rather than shielding them toward yourself; hiding a card you have exposed is the one thing that genuinely breaks the game, because everyone is entitled to the information a turn produces.

If the two cards match, take them, stack them in front of you, and turn two more. A run continues as long as you keep matching, so once the layout has been picked over a little a player who has been watching can clear several pairs on a single turn.

If they do not match, leave them face up long enough for everyone to have actually looked, then turn both back down without shifting them a hair from where they sat. The turn then passes to the left. The gaps left by cards that have been won stay open for the rest of the game: never close the layout up or slide the survivors together to tidy it, since the empty squares are part of what everyone is memorising. Watch for a grid that is being squared up, nudged or slid, whether or not anyone means anything by it, because a card's position is worth exactly as much as its rank.

Picking the first of your two cards is where the game is won, and the natural instinct is the wrong one. Reaching straight for the card you are surest of leaves you stranded when its partner turns out not to be where you thought, and it has just told the table where that card is. Turn something you have never seen instead. If it matches one of the cards you already know, go and take the match. If it matches nothing, take your second card from among the ones you already know anyway rather than exposing a second stranger: the pair is lost either way, and the only question left is how much you hand to the player after you. Two complete unknowns is right for the opening turn or two and essentially never again.

Play carries on round the table until the last card has been taken. Nobody can ever be stuck: any two face-down cards make a legal turn.

Goal & scoring

You are collecting pairs, and the player holding the most when the layout is empty wins. Matching by rank alone, a full pack yields 26 pairs, so two players can genuinely finish level at thirteen each. One account settles it outright — everybody tied for the most pairs wins together — and the other only notes that a tie for first place can happen. Neither calls for a play-off.

Count pairs rather than cards, and count at the end rather than as you go, so that nobody spends a turn totting up other people's stacks.

Once the cards are down, very little about the result is luck. The shuffle decides which blind turn happens to strike a pair, and that is the whole of it: every card is on the table and every card turned up is public, so the player who watches other people's turns as attentively as their own beats the one who only concentrates when it is their go. That is the reason this game gets handed to children so often. It rewards a single habit, and it rewards it immediately.

Variants

Rank and colour — A match must agree in rank and in colour, so the three of spades pairs only with the three of clubs, and the ace of hearts only with the ace of diamonds. Every card now has exactly one partner anywhere in the pack, which removes the accidental matches the rank-only game throws up and makes remembering a card precisely useful rather than approximately useful. One of the two published accounts gives this as the ordinary rule and rank alone as the variation, so it is worth asking which a new table means before the cards go down.

Two packs — Shuffle two 52-card packs together and lay all 104 out in eight rows of thirteen for a much longer and more punishing game. A pair now has to be identical, the same rank and the same suit, so the ten of clubs waits for the other ten of clubs and nothing else will do. The kindest form uses packs with different backs, shuffled separately and dealt into alternating positions like a chequerboard: because a card's partner is always in the other pack, a red-backed card can only ever be matched with a blue-backed one. That halves the number of candidates you have to hold in your head and makes an otherwise unmanageable layout playable.

Solitaire Concentration — Lay out the grid and play alone against your own record. Turn two cards at a time under the usual rules and keep count of how many turns you needed to clear the whole layout, or of how many turns failed to produce a pair. Fewer is better, and the running total is a surprisingly precise measure of how much attention you were actually paying.

One flip — Turning up a match wins you the pair but not another turn: play passes on either way. Runs disappear entirely, which stops the game turning on who happened to reach an already picked-over layout first, and it spreads the reward for a good memory evenly across the whole game instead of concentrating it in whoever gets the first long streak.

Fancy layouts — Nothing requires a rectangle. Circular, triangular and diamond-shaped layouts are all played and the dealer chooses; the loosest form scatters the cards across the floor and does not arrange them at all. They are harder than they look, because a grid gives every card an implicit row and column to hang the memory on, and an irregular shape takes that scaffolding away.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• kids
• memory
• quick
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Gambiter, Game Rules, Classic Games and Puzzles, Card Game Database Wiki.

Conquian

Also known as Conquián, Coon Can, Cooncan, Colonel

Players

2 players

Deck

1 standard deck stripped to 40 cards (A to 7 plus J, Q, K in each suit)

Time

15-25 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Rummy family

Setup

Two players, forty cards. A Spanish pack works exactly as it comes. From an ordinary deck, take out the jokers and every eight, nine and ten, which leaves ace through seven plus jack, queen and king in each suit. That gap is not cosmetic: with the middle ranks gone the seven and the jack are neighbours, so a sequence can run 6-7-J. Aces are always low.

Pick a first dealer any way you like and alternate afterwards. Ten cards go to each of you, dealt singly or in pairs, whichever you prefer, and the stock is the twenty nobody was dealt, face down between you. Nothing is turned face up to begin with, and there is never a discard pile: exactly one card is on offer at any moment, and a card that both of you refuse is turned face down and is dead for the rest of the deal.

Melds are laid face up in front of you as you make them and stay there for the rest of the deal, in plain view and — as you will discover — usable against you.

The target is eleven melded cards, not ten. Since you only ever hold ten, you cannot win out of your own hand: the eleventh card has to arrive from the stock or from what your opponent leaves behind.

Play

A meld is what it is everywhere else in rummy: three or four cards of one rank, or a sequence in one suit, which may be anything from three cards to eight. Aces are low and a sequence climbs from the seven straight to the jack, because the ranks between them are not in the pack. That ceiling of eight follows from the target rather than standing as a rule of its own — eleven melded wins, eleven cannot be one combination, and whatever you pair a long sequence with still needs three cards of its own.

What makes Conquian its own game is that no card ever reaches your hand from the table. Anything you take goes face up into a meld the moment you take it, or you do not take it.

Play opens with the non-dealer, who turns the stock's top card face up. Two choices: use it — as part of a fresh meld laid down with cards out of hand, or added to a meld already showing in front of you — or refuse it and leave it lying face up. Using it obliges you to throw one card from your hand face up afterwards, and that thrown card is what your opponent is offered next, so your holdings never grow. You never lay a meld down except with the card you have just taken, and you never add anything to your opponent's melds.

After that the two players alternate through an identical turn. Exactly one card lies face up when your turn begins — your opponent's throw-away, or the stock card they would not have — and it is offered to you first. Take it, meld it, and throw a card of your own face up in its place, which ends your turn; or wave it away, in which case it is turned face down at once and is out of the deal for good. Having waved it away you turn the next card of the stock yourself and face the same two choices with that one: use it and throw a card as before, or refuse it and leave it lying face up, which ends your turn and hands your opponent that card to consider.

That is the entire engine, and it is startlingly tight. There is no drawing to improve a holding, no keeping a card back for a turn or two, no discard pile to mine later. Twenty stock cards and two ten-card hands are the whole world, and every card either goes on the table at once or is dead.

Forcing. If the face-up card could join a meld already in front of you without help from your hand, and you decline it, your opponent may compel you to take it; you add it to the meld and still owe a card from your hand. They are allowed to move your melded cards about to make it fit, provided everything they leave on the table is still legal. This is not politeness, it is a weapon: an exposed meld is a standing liability, because your opponent can spend a card of their choosing to rip one out of your hand at a moment when you have none to spare. It is worth thinking twice before laying a long sequence down early.

Rearranging. Cards already melded are not frozen in place. You may move them between your own melds and borrow from one to build another, as long as everything left on the table is still a legal meld of at least three cards. A five-card sequence can lend a card to start a set; a four-card set can spare one and survive.

Winning. Because every card you take is paid for with a card you throw, ten is the ceiling on what you can hold and show: hand plus table never adds up to more. The target sits one above that ceiling deliberately. Put all ten down and you have an empty hand, a complete table, and no victory — there is simply nothing left to throw, so your turns become a matter of waiting. What settles the deal is a card that extends something already in front of you: when one is offered or turned and you take it, no discard is owed in return, and that eleventh melded card finishes the hand on the spot.

Running out. The deal is a draw when the last card of the stock has been turned, both players have finished with it, and neither has eleven cards on the table. There is nothing left to turn, so play stops there and neither player has lost.

Goal & scoring

Conquian keeps no score. A deal is won outright by whoever first has eleven cards melded face up, and that is the end of it — traditionally the game was played one deal at a time for a stake settled beforehand.

Draws are frequent and they are the interesting part. When the stock is spent and the last exposed card goes begging, nobody has won, the stake stays on the table for the next deal, and some players double it before that one starts. Two or three draws in a row can leave a single hand worth a great deal, which is precisely why the game rewards a player who waits rather than one who reaches.

To run a session without money, one arrangement is for the winner of a deal to score whatever the loser was still holding, repeating deals until somebody passes an agreed total. The awkward part is deciding what those cards are worth; one published schedule leaves the two to the seven at face value, makes every court card ten and puts the ace at fifteen. A deal won against an opponent still clutching four courts then counts for more than one scraped against an empty hand, which a flat point per deal cannot show.

Variants

Nine-card deal — Several published rule sets deal nine cards apiece and set the target at ten melded rather than eleven. The deal runs shorter and the stock is two cards deeper. Nothing else changes, but since the sources genuinely disagree about which is standard, agree on the number before the first card is dealt.

Full 52-card pack — Leave the eights, nines and tens in. Sequences then behave the way every other rummy player expects and the stock grows from twenty cards to thirty-two, which makes it a friendlier introduction. It is also rarely met: the short pack is what players of the game actually use, and the long one costs the tension that comes from a deck small enough to track card by card.

Three or four players — Conquian is not only a two-hander, and the same forty cards stretch to a bigger table by shrinking the hands. Three players take eight each and go out on nine; four take seven each and go out on eight. The exposed card travels round the table rather than back and forth, and anybody who could add it to their own melds is liable to be made to take it, so the standing threat that shapes the two-player game now comes at you from more than one direction. Mexican tables open with a swap as well: everyone picks a card, puts it face down at the same moment, and passes it to the same neighbour, committing before seeing what arrives.

Panguingue — A gambling relative of Conquian, known as Pan, played for decades in card rooms across the American southwest — though its own roots are more likely Philippine than Mexican, and the kinship is a family resemblance rather than a line of descent. Four to eight players use eight 40-card packs shuffled together, 320 cards, and certain melds, called conditions, pay out in chips the moment they are laid down rather than at the end of the deal. Which runs and which sets qualify takes a thicket of rules to say, and a player who does not like their hand may fold out before play begins.

Background

Conquian is the oldest game in the rummy family that anyone can still put a name to. It was being played in Mexico by the middle of the nineteenth century. The card writer R. F. Foster dated its arrival in the American southwest to the 1860s without saying how he knew; what actually survives is a description from 1887, by which time it was going under the name Coon Can. Card historians — David Parlett among them — treat it as the root that every western rummy game grew out of. Playing it feels like reading a first draft of Gin Rummy, with the drawing and the hoarding not yet invented.

• classic
• quick
• strategy
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards, Denexa Games, Cool Old Games, GameRules.com, David Parlett, card game histories.

Contract Bridge

Also known as Bridge, Rubber Bridge, Duplicate Bridge

Players

4 players

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards); most tables keep a second pack with different backs to speed the deal

Time

60+ minutes

Difficulty

Complex

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Bridge seats exactly four, locked into two partnerships for the session, each player facing their partner. Seats are named for the compass points, so one side is North and South and the other East and West, and those names are used for everything from filling in the score to discussing the hand afterwards.

Settle seats and the first deal by spreading a shuffled pack face down and having everyone draw a card. The two highest play against the two lowest; the highest card of all picks a seat and deals first. The deal then moves one place clockwise after every hand.

Use the full 52-card pack with jokers removed. Cards rank ace high down to the two, and the four suits are equal until the auction settles which of them, if any, is trumps. The player on the dealer's left shuffles and the player on the dealer's right cuts. Deal the entire pack one card at a time clockwise, beginning with the player on the dealer's left and ending with the dealer, thirteen to each player. Two packs are worked in tandem. While one hand is being played out, the spare pack is put in order by the player sitting opposite the dealer, who then parks it beside the seat that deals next; the following deal is therefore prepared before anyone needs it, and nobody has to stop and work out whose turn it is.

You need a score sheet. Rubber bridge uses one ruled with a vertical line separating the two sides and a horizontal line across it; trick points are written below that line and everything else above it, which is why bridge players talk about scoring above and below the line.

Vulnerability is a state a partnership is in, and it raises the stakes in both directions at once: bonuses grow and so do penalties. At rubber bridge you become vulnerable by winning a game and stay vulnerable for the rest of the rubber. At duplicate it is simply printed on the board and owes nothing to what happened on the deal before.

One thing this entry leaves out on purpose: bidding systems and conventions. Acol, Standard American, Stayman, Blackwood, transfers and the hundreds of gadgets built on top of them are agreements a partnership makes about what its bids mean. They are not rules, and no two partnerships need use the same ones. What follows is the machinery of the game, which is identical whatever system you have agreed.

Play

THE AUCTION

The dealer calls first and calling passes clockwise. On your turn you make exactly one of four calls.

• Bid. Name a number from one to seven and a denomination: one of the four suits, or notrump. The number counts tricks above the first six, so a bid of four hearts undertakes to win ten of the thirteen tricks with hearts as trumps, and seven of anything undertakes to win the lot. Each bid must outrank the one before it, either by naming a higher number or by naming a higher-ranking denomination at the same number.
• Pass. No bid this turn. Passing does not put you out of the auction; you may bid later if someone else keeps it alive.
• Double. Available only when the last bid was made by an opponent and nothing but passes has followed it. It is a claim that the contract will fail. It changes nothing about the play and nothing about how many tricks are needed; it only inflates the score, multiplying what declarer earns for succeeding and what the defenders collect for beating it.
• Redouble. Available only to the side whose bid has just been doubled, again with nothing but passes since. It inflates the same figures further.

Any fresh bid cancels a double or redouble, and the new contract starts out undoubled. The auction closes when a call is followed by three passes in a row, and the last bid made becomes the contract. Should all four players pass immediately, nobody has undertaken anything: at rubber bridge the deal is abandoned and passes on, while at duplicate the board is recorded as a zero for both sides.

Beware the trap in the doubled part-score. Because the trick score is what gets multiplied, doubling can push a modest contract over the hundred-point threshold and hand the opponents a game they had not bid for. Doubling is a scoring weapon, not a defensive one.

Irregularities such as bidding out of turn or making a bid that is too low do not simply get rewound. The Laws prescribe a specific rectification for each, usually restricting what the offender's partner may do afterwards, and in club play a director is called to apply it.

DECLARER AND DUMMY

The side that made the final bid plays the contract. Declarer is whichever of the two partners first named that denomination anywhere in the auction, which is not always the player who made the last bid: if your partner opened one spade and you eventually bid four spades, your partner is declarer. Declarer's partner becomes the dummy and the other two are the defenders.

PLAYING THE HAND

Before anything at all is revealed, the defender sitting to declarer's left has to open — which means choosing that card from the auction and nothing else. Only then does dummy lay all thirteen cards face up on the table, sorted into suits, with the trump suit placed at dummy's right. Declarer now plays both hands, naming which card to play from dummy when it is dummy's turn.

Dummy is a spectator for the rest of the hand. Dummy chooses nothing, advises nobody, and may not look at another player's cards; the one thing dummy may properly do is ask declarer whether a suit really is exhausted before a revoke becomes established.

Each trick runs clockwise from whoever leads. You must follow the suit led if you hold it; with none of that suit you may play anything, trump or discard, and you are never obliged to win a trick you could win. Whichever trump on the trick is biggest takes it, and where no trump was played, the biggest card of the opening suit does. The winner leads to the next trick, and thirteen tricks are played out.

Failing to follow suit while holding the suit is a revoke. It stays correctable until the offending side leads or plays to the following trick, at which point it is established; correcting it in time costs nothing beyond the exposure, and a defender's withdrawn card becomes a penalty card that has to be played at the first legal opportunity.

An established revoke is not replayed. Play runs to the end of the deal and the books are balanced afterwards, once all thirteen tricks are in.

What the balancing costs depends on how much the offending side got out of it, and two tricks is the ceiling. That ceiling is reached in one situation only: the revoker took the trick they revoked on and their side went on to take at least one more before the deal ended. Fall short of either half of that and the bill is a single trick — either because the revoker won the revoke trick but the side took nothing afterwards, or because the revoker lost it while the side still ended up with that trick or one that came later. Three situations cost nothing whatever: an offending side that took no trick at all from the revoke onwards, a revoke on the twelfth trick, and a deal on which both sides revoked. Where even the transfer leaves the innocent side short of what an honest hand would have given them, the director makes up the shortfall by adjusting the score outright.

Any player may claim or concede the remaining tricks at any point by putting the hand face up and stating how the rest will go. Play stops there and then. If anyone disputes it, the claim is settled by ruling rather than by playing on, and any genuinely doubtful trick is given against the claimer.

Goal & scoring

Declarer's side must win at least as many tricks as the contract undertook. The defenders are trying to hold them to fewer. Only one side scores on a deal: make the contract and declarer's side is paid, break it and the defenders collect a penalty while declarer scores nothing whatever.

Trick points are earned only for the tricks actually contracted for. Anything beyond that is an overtrick and is paid as a bonus, which is the reason bidding a game and bidding a slam matter so much: the bonus attaches to what you promised, not to what you happened to take.

A game is a hundred trick points. At rubber bridge those points go below the line and accumulate, so a part-score of forty sits there waiting and a later part-score of sixty finishes the game off. Bonuses and penalties go above the line, where they count toward the final total but never toward game. Winning a game wipes the slate below the line clean and makes you vulnerable. The first side to win two games takes the rubber and its bonus, and the match is decided by adding each side's whole column, above and below.

Duplicate bridge cuts the thread between deals. The same cards are played at every table, so each board is scored on its own: nothing carries over, a part-score earns a small flat bonus instead of banking toward anything, and a contract worth a hundred trick points pays its game bonus there and then. Vulnerability is preset on the board.

That raw score is then converted into a comparative one, which is the real point of the format. Matchpoint pairs scoring ranks your result against every other pair who held your cards, so a twenty-point edge counts as much as a slam. IMP scoring compresses the raw difference between two tables onto a scale that flattens small gains and still rewards big ones. Either way you are judged against what everyone else did with the same thirteen cards, which is what removes luck of the deal from the contest.

Honours are a rubber-bridge relic: a bonus for holding a clutch of top trumps in one hand, claimed at the end of the deal regardless of who won anything. Duplicate does not score them at all.

Variants

Chicago (four-deal bridge) — A fixed block of four deals rather than an open-ended rubber, which is why it suits an evening with a known finishing time. Vulnerability is set by the deal number instead of by winning games: nobody on the first, dealer's side on the second and third, everybody on the fourth. Games and part-scores are settled inside the block: a part-score carries forward and can be completed into a game by a later one, and a part-score made on the fourth deal that does not finish a game scores a flat 100 instead. Game bonuses are the duplicate figures, 300 not vulnerable and 500 vulnerable, and there is no rubber bonus because there is no rubber. The auction, the play and the trick values are unchanged.

Minibridge — The auction is removed entirely, which makes it the usual way to teach the play first. All four hands are dealt and each player announces their high-card points, counting four for an ace, three for a king, two for a queen and one for a jack. The side with more of them declares, and the stronger of its two hands is declarer; on a tie the player who announced first takes it. Dummy then goes down face up before anything else, which is the reverse of the real game, and only after seeing it does declarer name the denomination and say whether the target is a part-score of seven tricks or a game. The player on declarer's left leads and thirteen tricks are played out exactly as in the full game. Beginners get to practise declarer play and defence months before touching a bidding system.

Honeymoon bridge — A family of two-player adaptations, since bridge proper needs four. In the common form each player is dealt thirteen cards and the remaining twenty-six sit face down as a stock. Thirteen tricks are then played at notrump with the non-dealer leading and no obligation to follow suit; after each one the winner takes the top card of the stock and the loser the next, so both hands are back to thirteen when the stock is exhausted. Some players turn the top stock card face up so that each trick is visibly a contest for a known card. Only now do the two bid against each other, doubles and redoubles included, until one of them passes, and the contract is played out with no dummy, the non-declarer leading. It preserves the auction and the card play, though not the partnership judgement that makes bridge what it is.

Auction bridge — The direct ancestor, played until the late 1920s and still occasionally dealt. Everything about the auction and the play is familiar, but declarer scores trick points for every trick above six, whether or not the contract called for them. Overtricks therefore count toward game, so there is no reason to reach for a risky contract when a low one that takes the same tricks scores identically. Contract bridge's insistence on being paid only for what you promised is exactly what killed it.

• classic
• counting
• long-game
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards, American Contract Bridge League, The Bridge World, BridgeBum, Denexa Games, Britannica.

Contract Rummy

Also known as Combination Rummy, Joker Rummy, Deuces Wild Rummy

Players

3-8 players (best with 4)

Deck

2 standard decks with jokers for 3 or 4 players; 3 for 5 or 6; 4 for 7 or 8

Time

60-120 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Rummy family

Setup

Contract Rummy is a rummy game with a syllabus. A full game is seven deals, and each one names in advance the exact combination you have to assemble before you are allowed to put a single card on the table. The requirement grows harder as the game goes on, opening at two sets and closing on three runs, so an early deal is a sprint and the last one is a slog.

Three to eight can play and four is the optimum. The pack grows with the table: two 52-card decks up to four players, three for five or six, four for seven or eight, jokers included throughout. One published arrangement instead keeps two decks whatever the size of the table and uses one joker fewer than there are players, so three people play with 106 cards and five with 108; either works, but count them out before you deal. The jokers are the wild cards, and a table that wants a looser game simply shuffles in more of them. Treat identical cards as interchangeable.

Draw for the first deal and pass it to the left afterwards, so with seven deals in a game everyone deals at least once at most player counts. The number of cards dealt is not the same throughout: ten each for the first three deals, twelve each for the last four, the step coming where the fourth contract begins asking for three combinations instead of two. Some accounts put the step one deal later and deal ten for the fourth as well, which makes that contract of three sets a good deal harder.

After dealing, stack what is left face down as the stock and turn one card up beside it to open the discard pile. The player to the dealer's left goes first.

A set is three cards of the same rank, suits ignored. A run is four cards of one suit in sequence. Aces work at either end — A-2-3-4 and J-Q-K-A are both fine — but they do not turn the corner, so K-A-2-3 is not a run. Everything else follows from that. Keep a running score across all seven deals; the pad matters more here than in most rummy games, because nobody wins a deal outright.

Play

A turn is draw, meld or lay off if you are entitled to, then discard — the ordinary rummy shape, with two large complications bolted on.

Drawing. Take whichever you prefer of the two cards on offer, the stock's top or the pile's, as usual.

Buying. This is where Contract Rummy stops resembling its relatives. A discard the player in turn does not want is not dead: anyone else at the table may speak up for it, and must do so before that player has drawn. What a buy costs is bulk. The buyer collects the card they asked for and a stock card charged on top of it as the price, which leaves them carrying more cards than anybody else, and none of it entitles them to act — no meld, no lay-off, no discard, since their own turn is still somewhere ahead of them. The interrupted turn simply picks up where it stopped, and the player whose turn it was draws off the stock. Where several people speak at once, seating decides: the claim belongs to whichever of them will be in turn soonest. The player in turn never buys; for them, taking the top discard is simply their draw. How often you may buy is the thing to settle first, because the base game does not ration it at all: you may take the discard out of turn as often as you like, the only bar being that the same player may not take two of them in succession. Relatives do ration it — Shanghai Rummy allows two a round and charges two stock cards rather than one — so it is worth asking which you are playing. Buying is the whole texture of the game. You will hold a hand that is one card short of the contract for six turns, watch that card land on the pile out of turn, and have to decide whether it is worth going a card deeper to get it.

Melding. Your first appearance on the table has to be the deal's contract, laid down complete in a single turn, and nothing more than the contract — no extra cards attached to the sets, no fifth card on a run. Until you have done that you may not put down anything at all, so a hand that is one card short of the contract is a hand with nothing on the table and everything counting against you. Laying the contract down is the whole of that turn's melding: nothing may be laid off, on your own melds or anybody else's, until your next turn comes round. Some accounts do let you lay off on the same turn you go down, which is a materially easier game, so agree it first. Where a contract asks for two runs they may share a suit, but they may not be contiguous: 3-4-5-6 and 7-8-9-10 of spades is one eight-card run wearing a disguise and never counts as two. They have to be genuinely apart or genuinely overlapping, so 3-4-5-6 with 8-9-10-J is fine and so is 3-4-5-6 with 5-6-7-8. The bar applies only within one player's own contract: your run may sit flush against somebody else's, and two of yours that were apart when you laid them may be closed up later by cards laid off.

Jokers stand in for any card, and a meld may hold more than one. Where a joker sits in a run, a player who holds the card it is standing for may swap the real card in and take the joker — but only if they have already melded their own contract on an earlier turn, and the joker they gain has to be laid off in that same turn rather than saved. A joker melded into a set is dead: it cannot be reclaimed by anybody, so the same wild card is worth much more in a run than in a set.

Laying off. Once your contract is down, later turns open up: you may add cards to any meld on the table, your own or anyone else's, and this is how you shed the rest of your hand. Nothing obliges you to lay off, but every card left in your hand at the end of the deal is a penalty, so there is rarely a reason to sit on one.

Discarding. Finish the turn by putting one card face up on the pile, which is the card the whole table is about to be offered.

Going out. The deal ends the moment somebody has no cards left. In the first six deals that means melding or laying off everything but one card and discarding it. The seventh deal is different: there is no final discard, so the whole hand has to go down at once in the three runs the contract asks for. Three runs of four is twelve cards and you will be holding at least thirteen, so in this deal alone a run may be longer than four — and one of them has to be.

Running out of stock. When the last stock card is drawn, lift the discard pile, leave its top card lying where it is, shuffle the rest and set them face down as a fresh stock, and play on. If that stock empties too and still nobody has gone out, the deal stops there and everybody counts their hand — in that deal nobody escapes with zero.

Goal & scoring

There is no winner of a deal, only a player who escapes it cheaply. When somebody goes out, everyone else counts what is still in their hand and takes it as penalty points, and the totals run cumulatively through all seven deals. Whoever has fewest points once the seventh deal is scored wins, and no standard rule breaks a tie — agree beforehand whether level players share it or play one more deal of the seventh contract to settle it. A player who goes out scores nothing for that deal, which is the best result available.

Cards count against you at these values:

• Each joker: 15
• Each ace: 15
• Each king, queen or jack: 10
• Every other card: its own pip value, so a nine costs nine and a two costs two

The joker is the figure to settle before the first deal, because published rule sets disagree: 15 is the common price, 20 and 25 both appear, and the higher the number the less willing anyone is to sit on one. Relatives of the game flatten the pip cards into bands instead — five for anything up to a seven, ten for an eight and above — which is a different game to hold a hand in, since under the pip rule a hand of low cards is genuinely cheap.

The pressure the scoring creates is specific to this game. In an ordinary rummy you can meld a set early and reduce your exposure straight away. Here you may not put down anything at all until you have the entire contract, so an unlucky deal is one in which you hold twelve scoring cards from beginning to end and pay for every one of them. Buying a card to complete the contract two turns sooner is often worth going a card heavier, because the alternative is being caught with the lot.

Variants

Shanghai Rummy — The best-known relative, and near enough the same game. The same seven contracts, but eleven cards dealt every deal instead of ten and twelve, and four jokers in the two decks. Buying is capped at twice a deal and costs two stock cards rather than one. Two rules of its own: a run may hold only one joker, and aces are high only, so A-2-3-4 is not a run there. The wrinkle it is named for is the Shanghai itself — discard a card that fits a meld already on the table and you may call Shanghai as you do it, which protects it from being taken; fail to call, and anyone at all may claim it for that meld and make you draw blind from their hand in exchange.

Zioncheck — The 1930s American ancestor of the whole family, invented by Ruth Armson, and shorter than what grew out of it: six contracts rather than seven. It is more of a curiosity now than a game anybody organises an evening around, but the fixed-contract idea starts here, and everything else in this group is a tidied-up version of it.

Progressive and Liverpool Rummy — Two relatives that pull in opposite directions. Progressive Rummy keeps eleven cards a deal but runs to fifteen contracts rather than seven, climbing as far as five runs of three, with twos wild alongside the jokers and buying allowed only in the later deals — an evening's game rather than an hour's. Liverpool Rummy is Contract Rummy almost unchanged, with one flourish: the player to the dealer's right cuts before the deal, and cutting off exactly the number of cards the deal requires takes fifty points off their score.

Extra deals and house contracts — Tables routinely bolt on an eighth deal — four sets is the usual addition, pushing the three runs to the end — or rewrite the list outright, one published sequence running to ten contracts and asking for a run of ten along the way. Some also drop the final-deal rule that the whole hand must go down, letting the seventh deal finish with a discard like any other, which takes most of the sting out of it.

• classic
• counting
• family-friendly
• large-group
• long-game
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, GameRules.com, Official Game Rules, Denexa Games, The Rummy Rulebook, Gambiter.

Crazy Eights

Also known as Eights, Crazy 8s, Swedish Rummy, Rockaway, Last One, Craits

Players

2-7 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards) for two to five players; 2 decks shuffled together (104 cards) for six or seven

Time

15-30 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Shedding

Setup

Take the jokers out. One 52-card pack handles up to five players; with six or seven, shuffle two packs together and treat them as a single deck of 104. Duplicate cards cause no trouble, since suits and ranks only ever have to be matched, never compared.

Rank order is irrelevant while you are playing. Nothing beats anything else, and an ace is neither high nor low. Rank matters only at the end of the hand, when you count up what is left in the losers' hands.

Pick a first dealer any way you like; cutting for the high card is the usual method. The deal then moves one seat to the left after each hand. The dealer shuffles and deals one card at a time, clockwise, starting with the player on their left. In a two-player game each side gets seven cards. With three or more, everyone gets five.

Put the undealt cards face down in the middle as the stock, then turn the top one face up next to it. That card is the starter and it forms the beginning of the discard pile. If it happens to be an eight, count it as the dealer's own play: the dealer names a suit and the first player follows that. Groups who dislike opening on a wild card instead bury it and turn another, which works as well so long as everyone knows which you are doing.

The player to the dealer's left goes first, and play runs clockwise.

Play

On your turn you add exactly one card to the top of the discard pile. The card you play must agree with the card currently showing in either its suit or its rank. A ten of hearts, for example, can be covered by any other heart or by any other ten. That is the whole of the matching rule.

Eights are the exception, and they are wild. You may play an eight on top of anything at all, whatever the suit or rank showing, and you may do it on any turn. When you put an eight down you immediately name a suit out loud. The next player has to follow that named suit as though the eight were a card of it, and the named suit stays in force until somebody legally changes it. You are free to name the suit the eight itself belongs to, and you are free to name a suit you hold nothing in. You cannot name "eights" or a rank; only a suit. The only card that can be laid on an eight without regard to the suit called is another eight, which resets the naming.

If you have no legal play, you draw, and how far you draw is the one thing published accounts genuinely split on. One has you take a single card and end your turn whether or not it helped; the other has you keep drawing until something playable turns up. Some tables cap it at three as a compromise. Agree before the first deal, because it changes the game noticeably. What both accounts do agree on is that drawing is always available to you: you may draw on your turn even holding a card you could legally have played, which is how you hang on to an eight for a better moment.

When the stock runs out, take the discard pile, leave its top card in place, shuffle the rest and set them down as a new stock. Several widely printed rule sets skip this refill entirely and treat an empty stock as permanent, so decide which you are using before you start. If you do refill and the discard pile has nothing to spare, or if you are playing without refills, then the stock is simply gone. From that point a player with no legal play passes their turn instead of drawing. If the turn goes all the way around with every player passing, the hand is blocked and ends immediately with nobody going out.

Otherwise the hand ends the moment a player lays down their last card. The standard rule lets you go out on an eight, naming a suit that nobody will ever have to follow; plenty of groups ban this, so settle it in advance. A player down to one card must say "last card", and must say it before the next turn begins; forgetting costs two cards off the stock — the rule the commercial versions of the game made famous, and a standard one here rather than an embellishment.

Goal & scoring

Your aim in each hand is to be the first to run out of cards. Over a session, the aim is to be first to an agreed point target.

When someone goes out, every other player counts the value of what is still in their hand. Eights are punished hardest, which is the price of holding the game's most useful card too long. The player who went out scores the combined total of all the opposing hands. The usual target is fifty points per player at the table, so two play to 100, four to 200 and seven to 350, which keeps a session roughly the same length whatever the numbers. Some groups instead agree on a fixed count of deals and add up as they go.

If the hand blocks because the stock is exhausted and nobody can play, the player with the smallest hand total is credited with the difference between their own total and each opponent's, which is usually a much thinner score than going out cleanly.

A popular alternative flips the bookkeeping. Instead of the winner banking the opponents' cards, each player records the value of the cards left in their own hand as penalty points. Play stops as soon as anyone hits the agreed figure, and the lowest score at that moment wins. The card values are identical either way; only who receives the points changes.

Finish the deal you are in rather than stopping the instant somebody crosses the line. If two players end that deal past the target, the higher total takes it when the winner is collecting points and the lower total takes it when players are recording penalties. If they are exactly level, deal once more and let that hand decide.

Variants

Special-card eights — The house-rule package that most tables end up adopting, and the one that commercial versions were built from. A two costs whoever follows their turn and two cards off the stock, unless they hold a two to lay on top of it, in which case the penalty stacks and passes along. A queen skips the next player. An ace turns the direction of play around, which in a two-handed game amounts to a skip. A jack is sometimes used as a second skip. The eight stays wild through all of this. Once you have these on the table you are effectively playing Uno with a standard pack, which is roughly how Uno came about: it was designed in 1971 by an Ohio barber named Merle Robbins after arguments about exactly these kinds of Crazy Eights house rules.

Mau-Mau — The German game that Crazy Eights descends from, still played across central Europe and sold under other names in Switzerland and the Netherlands. It is usually played with a 32-card pack. The jack, not the eight, is the wild card that lets you name a suit. A seven makes the next player draw two, and those penalties stack if they hold a seven of their own. An eight skips a turn. You must call out "Mau" as you play your second-to-last card and "Mau-Mau" as you play the last, and forgetting costs you a penalty draw.

Switch — The British form, and the one most often meant when someone talks about playing Switch or Black Jack. The suit-changing wild card is the ace rather than the eight. Twos make the next player pick up two, and stack if that player also holds a two. Eights or jacks skip a turn depending on the group, and the black jacks are often a heavy pick-up penalty that only a red jack can cancel. A player down to their last card must announce it before their turn ends.

Crazy Eights Countdown — Each player carries a personal countdown number and everybody starts on eight. The rank matching your current number is your own private wild card, so at the start the eight is wild for all. What moves you down the countdown is winning a hand, not playing the wild card: shed your last card and your number drops by one, so the seven becomes your wild card for the next deal, then the six, and so on. The first player to get their number below one wins the session outright and no points need to be counted. Extra powers are usually layered on top: a jack skips the next player, a two forces a draw of two, and the queen of spades forces a draw of five.

Draw-one Eights — The most common single point of disagreement about this game, played as a deliberate rule rather than a mistake. A player who cannot follow suit or rank draws exactly one card from the stock. If it plays, they may play it; if it does not, their turn is over and the next player goes. Hands stay much smaller than in the draw-until-you-can version, deals run quicker, and blocked hands become far more frequent, so the tie-break scoring for a blocked hand actually gets used.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• kids
• luck
• quick
• travel

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, Dice Game Depot, Official Game Rules, Game Rules, Ducksters, PlayingCardDecks.

Cribbage

Also known as Crib, Six-card Cribbage

Players

2-4 players (best with 2)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), plus a cribbage board or pencil and paper

Time

20-45 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Matching & collecting

Setup

Two players, one standard 52-card deck, and a cribbage board with two pegs each. Cards rank king high down to ace low, and for counting purposes an ace is 1, a face card is 10, and everything else is worth its index. The ace is always low and runs never turn the corner: ace-two-three is a run, queen-king-ace is not.

Cut for the deal: low card deals first, and the deal alternates every hand afterwards. Cutting for the first deal matters, because the dealer's edge is real and it swaps every deal.

Deal six cards to each player, one at a time, and put the rest of the deck face down to one side. Look at your six and lay two of them face down in a pile off to the dealer's side of the board. Those four cards are the crib, an extra hand that the dealer alone will score at the end of the deal, so the non-dealer throws to it defensively and the dealer throws to it generously. Neither player looks at the crib until the hands have been played out.

Once both hands are down to four cards and the crib is out of the way, the non-dealer makes a cut; the dealer lifts the upper half clear, takes whichever card the cut has exposed underneath, and sets it face up on the reassembled deck. This is the starter, and it is shared: both hands and the crib count it as a fifth card at the end of the deal. It sits out the pegging entirely. A jack turned as the starter is worth 2 to the dealer there and then, called two for his heels; strict play wants it claimed before the opening lead, and a dealer who forgets forfeits it.

Both pegs start off the board. Score by leapfrogging the back peg ahead of the front one, so the gap always shows what you just scored.

Play

A deal has two phases: the play, usually called pegging, and then the show.

The play. The non-dealer leads a card face up in front of them and announces its value. The dealer plays a card and announces the new running total, and so on alternately, each of you keeping your own played cards in a personal row rather than a shared pile so the hands can be picked up again afterwards. The running total may never exceed 31.

You peg immediately as you lay a card down: 2 for taking the total to exactly 15; 2 for taking it to exactly 31; 2 for matching the rank just laid; 6 if you make it three of that rank; 12 for a fourth. A run of three or more scores a point per card, counting backwards through the cards played since the last reset, in any order, as long as no unrelated card sits among them and no rank is repeated. A duplicate kills the run: once 2, 3, 4 has pegged three, a second 3 played on top scores nothing at all, because the four cards contain two 3s and the last three played are not a run either. Runs can be lengthened by either player: after 6, 4, 5 has scored three, a 3 or a 7 scores four. Suits are irrelevant during the play, and a pair is only a pair if the card just before it matched, not merely if the rank appeared earlier.

Go. You must play whenever you legally can; passing by choice is not allowed. If every card left in your hand would push the total past 31, say "go". Your opponent then keeps playing on their own for as long as they legally can. Once the count is stuck and no legal card can follow, a single point goes to the player who put down that final card, or 2 where the count happens to have stopped dead on 31. The count then resets to zero and the player who did not lay that last card leads to the new count, with whatever cards remain. This is the same point people call "last card": when both hands run dry, the player who laid the final card of the deal takes that single point, or 2 if it happened to make 31. It is one point, not a go point plus a last-card point.

The show. When both hands are empty, everyone picks their four cards back up and scores them together with the starter, treating it as a fifth card. Counting happens in a fixed order and must be done aloud: the non-dealer's hand first, then the dealer's hand, then the dealer's crib. That order decides close games, because play stops the moment a peg reaches the game hole. A non-dealer sitting on 118 counts first and can win before the dealer's hand and crib are ever counted.

The deal then passes to the other player, all fifty-two cards are gathered up and shuffled, and the next hand begins. Points are pegged as they are earned, never totalled at the end, and a peg once advanced cannot be moved back; if you overlook points and start the next stage, they are lost, unless you are playing muggins, in which case your opponent takes them.

Goal & scoring

First to 121 points wins, which is twice around a standard board plus the game hole. Points are pegged continuously, and the game ends instantly when a peg reaches 121, mid-count if necessary.

A hand or crib is scored as those four cards plus the starter, and every scoring combination that can be made from those five counts, including the same card used again and again in different combinations:

• Fifteen: any group of cards adding to exactly 15 scores 2, and you count every distinct group.
• Pair: 2 per pair. Three of a kind is three separate pairs and so scores 6; four of a kind scores 12.
• Run: 3 or more in consecutive rank scores 1 per card, and each distinct run counts. A double run of three (a run plus a duplicated rank) scores 8 in all, since it is two runs of three plus a pair.
• Flush: 4 if all four cards in hand share a suit, 5 if the starter matches too. In the crib only the full five-card flush scores; four matching crib cards on their own are worth nothing.
• His nobs: 1 for holding the jack of the starter's suit, in hand or in the crib.
• His heels: 2 to the dealer, pegged at once, when the starter turned is a jack.

The highest possible hand is 29: three fives and the jack matching a starter five. Zero-point hands are common enough to have their own name, a nineteen.

In match play, a loser still short of 91 is skunked and the win is usually worth double; short of 61 is a double skunk.

Variants

Five-card cribbage — The original English form. Five cards are dealt to each player, both discard two, and hands of only three are played, so pegging is short and the crib carries a lot of the scoring. Game is 61, once around the board, and the non-dealer pegs 3 straight away at the start of the game as compensation for not having the first crib.

Three-handed cribbage — Each player is dealt five cards and discards one to the crib. Because that leaves the crib a card short, the dealer also deals one card face down to it straight off the deck. Everyone plays alone on a triangular board, the deal rotates left, and the player to the dealer's left leads the first card and counts first at the show.

Partnership cribbage — The standard four-player game: two teams of two, partners facing each other, one peg line per team. Deal five cards each and everyone discards one to the dealer's crib. Play proceeds clockwise around the table, and either partner's points advance the shared peg. First side to 121 wins.

Muggins — An optional rule that punishes sloppy counting. If you finish counting a hand or crib and have missed points, your opponent may call "muggins" and peg those points instead. It is common in club and tournament play and worth agreeing on before the first deal rather than after somebody undercounts.

• classic
• counting
• family-friendly
• strategy
• travel
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, American Cribbage Congress, Masters of Games.

Doppelkopf

Also known as Doko

Players

4-5 players (best with 4)

Deck

2 standard decks stripped to 48 cards (two of each A, K, Q, J, 10, 9 in every suit)

Time

45-90 minutes

Difficulty

Complex

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

An ordinary deal is two against two, and for the first trick or two nobody is sure which two. That is the game: the partnerships are hidden inside the deal and have to be worked out from what people play.

Build the pack from two ordinary decks. Take A, K, Q, J, 10 and 9 of each suit out of both and put the rest away, which leaves forty-eight cards and two identical copies of every one of them. Packs sold for the game in Germany hold the same forty-eight, usually in the ordinary suits with the queen indexed D for Dame and the jack B for Bube. Where German-suited cards are used instead, those two are the Ober and the Unter.

The rules below are the tournament rules of the Deutscher Doppelkopf-Verband, which is the one published standard the game has. Informal play is another matter — the association was founded in 1982 precisely because the game was played to very different rules from one region to the next, and it changed the kitchen table hardly at all, so a table you have not sat at before will have house rules. Ask before the first deal; the commonest additions are in the variants below.

Deal twelve cards to each player in four rounds of three, starting to the dealer's left and going clockwise. Nothing is left over. The deal moves one seat left each hand. Five may sit down, in which case the dealer takes no cards and no score that hand, so a fifth player costs everyone one hand in five rather than a seat.

Card values are the ones Skat uses: an ace is 11, a ten is 10, a king 4, a queen 3, a jack 2, and the nines count nothing. Sixty points sit in each suit and 240 in the pack, and the whole game is a fight over the halfway line.

The ranking is the part to learn before dealing rather than during. In an ordinary hand every queen, every jack and the whole diamond suit are trumps — twenty-six cards of the forty-eight — headed by the ten of hearts, which is called the Dulle. The queens come next in the fixed order clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds, then the four jacks in that same order, then diamonds from the ace down. What is left is three short side suits: clubs and spades run ace, ten, king, nine, and hearts runs ace, king, nine, because its ten has gone to the trumps.

One consequence catches everyone. Since each card is in the pack twice, two players can put the identical card on a trick, and the one played earlier is the one that wins it. That is true of the Dulle as well.

Play

Reservations. Before a card is played the table finds out what kind of hand this is. Starting to the dealer's left, each player says gesund — healthy — meaning an ordinary hand suits them, or Vorbehalt, a reservation, meaning it does not. Four healthies and it is a normal hand. Otherwise whoever reserved says what they want, and the highest-ranking wish is played: a solo outranks a marriage, and a solo somebody is obliged to bid outranks a voluntary one, since a tournament round requires each player to take one solo during it. Where two players want the same thing the earlier speaker gets it.

A normal hand needs no declaring at all, and this is the mechanism the whole game hangs on. The two players holding the queens of clubs are the Re side and the other two are Kontra, and nobody says which they are. Working that out, and keeping your own side quiet, is most of the skill.

A marriage is what a player does when both queens of clubs turn up in one hand. Rather than take on three opponents alone, they declare Hochzeit and then take as partner whoever wins the first trick that the marriage holder does not — the clarifying trick — within the first three. Win all three yourself and the offer expires: you finish the hand as a lone diamond solo. A player dealt both queens who says nothing at all is committed to a silent marriage, which is that same diamond solo played without warning anybody.

A solo is one player against three, and it changes what is trump:

• Suit solo: the declared suit's ace, ten, king and nine take over the place the diamonds held, at the foot of the trump order below the queens and jacks. Hearts as trump is the awkward one, since its ten is already the Dulle, so a hearts solo has twenty-four trumps rather than twenty-six.
• Queen solo: the eight queens and nothing else. Every suit then runs ace, ten, king, jack, nine.
• Jack solo: the eight jacks and nothing else, with the suits running ace, ten, king, queen, nine.
• Aces solo: no trumps whatsoever, all four suits ace, ten, king, queen, jack, nine. Its German name, Fleischloser, means meatless.

The tricks. Whoever spoke first in the reservations leads to the first trick, except that a compulsory solo hands the lead to the soloist; after that the previous trick's winner leads. Follow suit if you can — and the trap is that the trumps count as one suit for that purpose, having eaten three ranks out of every other. A spade lead asks for the ace, ten, king or nine of spades and nothing else, so the queen of spades will not answer it, and leading that queen asks the table for trumps rather than for spades. Anyone who cannot follow may trump or throw away, as they like — there is no obligation to do either. A trick with any trump on it belongs to the highest of them; a trick with none belongs to whoever went highest in the suit that opened, and two identical cards are settled by which was put down first.

Announcements. These raise what the hand pays and are the only sanctioned way to tell your partner you exist. A player says Re while holding at least eleven cards to claim the queens-of-clubs side will win it, or Kontra on the same terms for the other side; because that is eleven and not twelve, the first trick is free and you can watch it before committing. Everything beyond that is a claim about how badly the opponents will do, and each step demands a card fewer in hand and rests on the step before it:

• No 90 — the opponents will finish under 90 — with at least ten cards.
• No 60, with at least nine.
• No 30, with at least eight.
• Schwarz, meaning they will not take a single trick, with at least seven.

None of these may be said before your side has said Re or Kontra, so the ladder is climbed in order or not at all. After a marriage the clock starts late: nothing may be announced until the clarifying trick is finished, since until then nobody knows who they are playing with.

Goal & scoring

Count the card points in your side's tricks. Re has to reach 121 of the 240 and Kontra needs only 120, since a tie in cards goes to the defenders. Announcing changes those numbers. Say Kontra and your own bar rises to 121. And every negative announcement replaces your bar with the one you promised — 151 for no 90, 181 for no 60, 211 for no 30, and every trick for schwarz — so a side that said no 60 loses the hand at 180, however comfortable 180 sounds.

What gets written down is a single figure per deal, plus for the winners and minus for the losers, so the four columns always add to nothing. The figure is built by adding a point for each thing that actually happened, and almost everything counts once: the win itself, every thirty-point threshold the losers fell under, a clean sweep of the tricks, each negative announcement anybody made, and each of those the winners went on to play through anyway. Re and Kontra are the exception at two points each, and they count for whichever side ends up collecting rather than for whoever said them. The table has the full list.

Four more are available in a normal hand only, and never in a solo. One goes to Kontra simply for beating the queens of clubs. One goes for taking a trick worth 40 or more, which is itself called a doppelkopf and can only happen when all four cards are tens or aces. One goes for capturing an opponent's ace of diamonds, the fox. One goes for winning the final trick with a jack of clubs, known as Charlie Miller.

A soloist's figure is tripled and written into their own column alone, while each of the three opponents takes the untripled figure with the sign reversed. Losing a solo you talked up is the expensive way to spend an evening.

There is no target score in the rules. A session is an agreed number of deals, usually whole rounds of the table so that everybody deals equally often, and the highest running total at the end wins. A tournament round is twenty-four deals and is stopped at a hundred minutes of play, which is a fair guide to how long a dozen hands will take you.

Variants

Poverty (Armut) — The best known of the additions the tournament rules leave out, and worth having. A player dealt three trumps or fewer may reserve and declare poverty, then push three cards face down across the table, which must include every trump they hold. Going clockwise, each of the others may take the three cards unseen and return any three in exchange; whoever accepts becomes the partner for the hand and the two of them are Re. Turned down all round, the deal is annulled and the same dealer deals again. It is a better contract than it looks, because the pauper can now throw high cards onto tricks the partner is already winning.

Without nines — Throw all eight nines out and play a forty-card pack, ten cards each. Called scharfer Doppelkopf, sharp Doppelkopf, and popular enough in casual play to be worth asking about before you sit down. Every hand is stronger, the dead cards are gone, and the balance tips further toward the trumps, which go from 26 of the 48 to 24 of the 40. Everything else is unchanged.

The second Dulle wins — Some tables reverse the tie rule for the tens of hearts alone, so that when both fall on one trick the second beats the first. It looks like a footnote and is not: holding the Dulle is no longer a safe way to take a trick you must have, and the standard trick of leading one at a marriage in order to be adopted stops working. A common refinement plays it the ordinary way round on the last trick only.

Piglets (Schweinchen) — A player dealt both aces of diamonds may announce Schweinchen, and those two cards become the highest trumps in the hand, above the Dulle. Tables disagree about when the announcement has to be made and whether one or both aces are promoted, so settle it first. Where piglets are played, a holder of both nines of diamonds can sometimes answer with super piglets, which go above the piglets in turn.

Bock rounds — A doubling round triggered by an agreed event — a hand where both sides take exactly 120, a Re or Kontra announced and then lost, a deal that scores nothing. From the next deal onward every score is doubled for a full round of the table, one deal per player. Nothing in the tournament rules knows about them; they belong to casual play, along with poverty and the piglets, which is reason enough to ask what is running before you sit down.

Background

Doppelkopf grew out of Schafkopf, the south German game that had a written rulebook by 1895, by the straightforward expedient of playing it with two packs — the doubling is where the name comes from. It went the other way geographically from its parent and is now played across Germany but concentrated in the north and around the Rhine and the Main.

Until the 1980s there was no such thing as the rules of Doppelkopf, only the rules wherever you happened to be. The Deutscher Doppelkopf-Verband was founded in March 1982, at the first German championship in Braunschweig, to write a single set for competition. It succeeded at that and left the kitchen-table game largely as it found it, which is why an entry like this one has to say which rules it is describing.

• classic
• counting
• long-game
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Deutscher Doppelkopf-Verband.

Dou Dizhu

Also known as Fight the Landlord, Landlord, 斗地主

Players

3-4 players (best with 3)

Deck

1 standard deck with both jokers (54 cards); the four-player version wants two decks and four jokers

Time

20-45 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Shedding

Setup

Three players, and the shape of the game is one of them against the other two. Whoever wins the auction becomes the landlord, takes the three extra cards, and plays a hand of twenty alone; the other two are peasants, allied for that hand and no longer. Those three face-down cards are what the auction is really for.

The pack is all fifty-four cards, both jokers included, and the jokers have to be distinguishable from one another — one red and one black. Suits are irrelevant everywhere in this game, for combinations, for beating and for anything else.

The ranking takes a minute and then never troubles you again. Bottom to top: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, king, ace, two, black joker, red joker. The two sitting above the ace is the piece that catches people, and the twos are correspondingly precious.

Nobody deals here; everyone draws for themselves. Somebody shuffles, the player on their left cuts, and the pack goes face down in the middle. Turn one card face up and push it back into the middle of the stack — whoever happens to draw it will open the auction. Players then take cards off the top in turn, anti-clockwise, looking at each as they go, until every hand holds seventeen. Three cards stay on the table, face down and untouched.

Play

The auction settles who plays alone. Whoever drew the face-up card speaks first, and the only bids available are 1, 2 and 3 — a number of stake units, not of cards or tricks. Each player in turn passes or names a figure above the last. It ends when two players pass in a row, or the moment somebody says 3, since nothing beats it. Everyone passing throws the hand in for a fresh deal.

Whoever bid highest is the landlord. They pick up the three cards waiting on the table, which brings their hand to twenty against seventeen apiece, and the remaining two players are peasants allied for the duration.

The landlord leads, playing any single card or any legal combination. Each player after them, going anti-clockwise, must either pass or beat what is on the table — and beating it means playing the same type of combination with the same number of cards and a higher rank. Not a different shape of the same size: the same shape. A pair answers a pair and a five-card run answers a five-card run, and nothing else will do.

Bombs and rockets are the exception, and the only one. A bomb is four cards of a rank and beats any combination at all except a bigger bomb or a rocket. A rocket is the two jokers together and beats everything in the game.

Play goes round for as many circuits as it takes until two players pass in succession. The cards on the table are then cleared away and whoever played last starts again with anything they like. Passing does not shut you out — you may come back in on a later circuit of the same round.

The combinations, thirteen of them:

• Single card.
• Pair, two of a rank.
• Triplet, three of a rank.
• Triplet plus one loose card, such as 6-6-6-8. The triplet's rank is what counts, so 9-9-9-3 beats 8-8-8-A.
• Triplet plus a pair, a full house in all but name, again ranked on the triplet.
• Sequence, five or more consecutive cards from the 3 up to the ace. Twos and jokers are barred from every sequence in the game.
• Sequence of pairs, three or more consecutive pairs.
• Sequence of triplets, two or more consecutive triplets.
• Sequence of triplets with a loose card attached to each. The attachments must differ from every triplet, though they may happen to pair up with one another. A two or a joker may be attached even though neither can be part of the sequence; both jokers at once may not.
• Sequence of triplets, each one carrying a pair. Only the triplets need to run consecutively. The pairs must differ from one another and from the triplets, and loose cards and pairs may never be mixed inside one play.
• Bomb, four of a rank.
• Rocket, both jokers.
• Quadplex set: a quad carrying two extras. Either two loose cards, whose ranks must differ from each other, or two pairs, likewise differing. The quad fixes the rank. This is the awkward one, and it is worth reading twice: the only thing a quadplex set can defeat is a weaker quadplex built the same way. It takes down no other combination in the game, and any bomb whatever — the very lowest will do — takes it down.

Goal & scoring

Empty your hand. If the landlord does it first, the landlord has won. If either peasant does it first, both peasants have won together — which is the rule that makes them genuine partners rather than two people who happen to be losing to the same person.

That has a consequence worth stating plainly, because it is the single thing newcomers get wrong. As a peasant, helping your partner go out is worth exactly as much as going out yourself. So you do not beat your partner's cards, you feed them the lead when they are close, and if one of you clearly has the stronger hand the other plays entirely in service of it. A peasant who plays to win personally is playing the wrong game.

The money settles per opponent rather than into a pot. The landlord winning collects the stake from each of the other two; the landlord losing pays it to each of them. The stake starts at whatever the winning bid was — one, two or three units — and then gets multiplied.

Every bomb and every rocket played in the hand doubles the payment, no matter who played it or which side they were on. They stack. A hand bid at 3 that saw two bombs and a rocket is settled at twenty-four units each way, so the arithmetic escalates far faster than the bidding ever suggested and a single defensive bomb can turn a routine hand into the biggest of the evening.

There is a doubling for humiliation at each end. If the peasants never got a single combination onto the table, that is a spring, and the landlord's winnings double again. If the peasants win having let the landlord play nothing beyond their opening combination, the landlord's payment doubles in the same way.

Nothing carries over between hands. Each deal is settled in units and the next auction starts clean.

Variants

Four-player Fight the Landlord — Played mainly around Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Shanghai. Two packs and four jokers, 108 cards: twenty-five to each player and eight to the landlord, who holds thirty-three against three opponents in partnership. The combinations change to suit the bigger hand. Attaching single cards is dropped entirely, as are quadplex sets. A bomb may be four cards or more, and more cards beats fewer regardless of rank, so a five-card bomb of threes takes out a four-card bomb of aces. A rocket now needs all four jokers, and a red and a black joker cannot be paired together — though two reds or two blacks can, as a pair on their own or attached to a triplet. Only bombs of six cards or more, and rockets, double the payment.

Showing the landlord's three — The older practice was for the landlord to pick the three face-down cards up privately, so nobody else ever learned what they were. Turning them face up for everyone to see first has since spread far enough that some accounts simply give it as the rule. It is a real change rather than a courtesy: the peasants learn three of the fifty-four cards and, more usefully, know exactly which cards the landlord did not have when they bid.

Choosing who opens the auction — The face-up card buried in the stack is one way of picking the first bidder and not the only one. One house rule gives the opening bid to whoever holds the three of hearts, falling to the four of hearts if nobody has it, and so on upwards. Others simply rotate the privilege one seat per deal in the direction of play, which is the tidiest arrangement for a long session. Online rooms generally just pick somebody at random. It matters more than it sounds, since bidding first means bidding with the least information.

Background

The name is a fossil. Dou Dizhu means fighting the landlord, and it dates from the land reform campaigns of the 1950s, which set peasants against landlords in earnest. The game came out of Hubei and is now one of the most played in China, and nobody hears the name that way any more.

• betting
• classic
• counting
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, GameRules.com.

Durak

Also known as Podkidnoy Durak, Fool

Players

2-6 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck stripped to 36 cards (6 up to ace in each suit)

Time

15-30 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Shedding

Setup

Strip a standard pack of everything below the six, leaving thirty-six cards. Inside a suit the order is the ordinary one, six lowest through ace highest. Cards carry no point values whatever; they exist only to be compared with one another.

Two to six can play and four is the number the game sits best at. Do the arithmetic before you sit down, because six hands of six cards use all thirty-six and leave no talon whatever. The game still works: the dealer's own last card is the one turned for trumps, everyone gets a look at it, and the dealer then takes it into hand with their other five. Five players leaves a talon of six. A full 52-card pack is available for either count and is described below, but one account calls that form very rare and says thirty-six is the normal pack.

Cut for the first dealer, low card dealing. Deal six cards to each player, going clockwise. Turn the next card face up, lay it on the table, and set the rest of the pack down across it so a corner of it stays in view. That card fixes the trump suit for the whole deal, and it is also the very last card anyone will be able to draw. The pile is the talon.

On the first deal of a session, whoever holds the lowest trump attacks first — the six, shown to prove the claim if the table wants proof. If it is in the talon, the trump seven starts instead, and failing that the eight, and so on up. Nobody redeals over it. Holding the lowest trump does not oblige you to open with it; attack with whatever you like. On later deals whoever was the fool last time takes the pack and deals, and the attack then falls to the player on their left rather than to them.

The lowest trump in the pack — the six in the 36-card game — buys its holder the turned-up trump: put the six under the talon, take the turn-up into hand. You may do it at any time before the talon runs out, and only if the six was dealt to you or drawn by you. Pick it up from a defence you lost and the right does not come with it.

There is no score sheet and nothing to write down. A deal simply runs until one player is left holding cards.

Play

A deal is a run of bouts. In each bout one player attacks one other, and the defender is always the player to the attacker's left. Everyone else at the table is a potential attacker.

The attack. The principal attacker lays one card from hand, face up, where the defender can reach it. Nothing is being led and nothing is being won: no suit has to be followed, the card competes with nothing, and it is simply a problem the defender now has to solve.

The defence. To beat a card, cover it with something stronger: within its own suit, anything ranking above it; failing that, any trump. Once a trump is on the table only a higher trump will beat it. Beaten cards and the cards that beat them stay on the table in pairs where everybody can read them.

Throwing in. As soon as a bout is under way, any card of a rank that already appears somewhere on the table may be added to the attack — the ranks of the defending cards count too, not just the attack cards. The principal attacker may keep throwing in, and so may the other players, which is where the game's usual name comes from: podkidnoy means thrown in. The principal attacker always has first refusal; once they pass, the others may throw in, taking their turn clockwise from the defender's left. Each new card has to be beaten separately.

Two limits, and neither is optional. A bout may never contain more than six attacking cards in total. It also may never contain more attacking cards than the defender held in hand when the bout opened — count them at that moment, not later, so a defender who started the bout with two cards faces at most two. Many tables cap the opening bout of a deal at five attacking cards, since defending first in a crowded game is punishing enough on its own.

Ending a bout. There are exactly two outcomes and they could not be more different. If the defender covers everything and the attackers have nothing left to throw in or decline to continue, the defence held: the whole heap goes face down onto a discard pile that nobody ever touches again, and those cards are gone from the deal. If the defender gives up at any point, they take every card on the table into hand, including the ones they had already beaten, and are that much further from getting rid of them.

Refilling. Between bouts everyone tops their hand back up to six from the talon. The order matters once the talon is nearly empty: the principal attacker draws first, then everyone else in clockwise order from them, and the defender last of all, however few cards that leaves. Nobody draws once the talon is exhausted, and the face-up trump is the final card taken.

Who attacks next. A defender who held takes over the attack, aiming the next bout at the player on their own left. A defender who picked up is passed over: the attack skips them and falls to the player beyond.

The endgame. Any player whose hand empties, with no talon left to refill from, is finished and drops out; the rest carry on around the gap. Play continues until one person is still holding cards.

Goal & scoring

Nobody wins Durak. Everyone who empties their hand while cards are still moving walks away clean, and the single player left holding cards at the end is the durak — the fool. That is the whole result of a deal.

Two things follow from a game shaped that way. There is no score, no ranking of the players who got out, and nothing to argue about afterwards; the fool traditionally shuffles and deals the next hand, often with the pack pushed at them. And because nothing is being collected, a bout you defend brilliantly is worth precisely nothing in itself. The only question that ever matters is whether cards left your hand or arrived in it.

Once the talon is empty the character of the game changes completely. Hands stop being replenished, so every pick-up is permanent damage, and the player who can force an opponent to take three cards near the end has usually decided the deal. Trumps hoarded through the early bouts are what make that possible, which is the standing tension of the game: a trump spent to defend cheaply is a trump you no longer have to attack with.

A deal can also end with no fool at all. Nothing finishes mid-bout, so if the last attack is beaten off and nobody is left holding a card — the attacker spent everything attacking, the defender everything defending — the hand is simply drawn.

Where a running tally is wanted, write down who was the fool each deal and play an agreed number of deals, or until somebody has been the fool a set number of times.

Variants

Perevodnoy Durak (passing on) — The best-known variation, and the one that most changes how a bout feels. Instead of beating the attack or picking it up, a defender holding a card of the same rank as the attack card may play it alongside and shove the whole attack sideways onto the next player, who becomes the defender. That player may add a further matching card and pass it on again, so an attack of one card can arrive at the fourth seat as an attack of four. What stops it is the ordinary six-card ceiling: once six cards are on the table nothing more can be thrown in and nothing more can be transferred, and the cards already beaten still count towards the six. A further form lets a defender transfer by merely showing a trump of the matching rank, keeping the card. Always played as individuals, never in partnerships.

Team Durak — Four players in two partnerships seated alternately, or six in two teams of three. Partners never attack one another, and they do throw in to help each other's attacks, so the six-card cap becomes a coordinated weapon rather than an individual one. A side is finished when both or all three of its members are out, and the losing partnership are the fools together. Signalling is not allowed, but discarding to help a partner obviously is, which gives the partnership game a cooperative texture the free-for-all does not have.

52-card Durak — For five or six players, the full pack can be used instead, with the two low and the ace high, still six cards each. One account records this as very rare and says thirty-six cards are the normal pack even at those numbers, so it is worth agreeing rather than assuming. The extra sixteen cards stretch every suit out, so a middling card is far less likely to hold, and they guarantee a talon at six players where the 36-card game has none. The swappable lowest trump becomes the two rather than the six. Attacking, defending and throwing in are unchanged.

• classic
• family-friendly
• quick
• strategy
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Official Game Rules, Gambiter, Wikibooks Card Games, Nordic Card Games, PlayJoy, Group Games 101.

Egyptian Ratscrew

Also known as Egyptian Rat Screw, ERS, Egyptian War, Egyptian Rat Slap, Slaps

Players

2-8 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards); some groups leave the jokers in so the deal comes out even, or add a second deck above six players

Time

15-45 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Matching & collecting

Setup

You need a flat surface everyone can reach and hit. A table is better than a floor, and a hard surface is better than a bed, because the pile has to stay square enough to see the top card.

Pick a dealer any way you like; if you play a second game, pass the deal to the left. Shuffle and deal the whole pack out one card at a time, face down, going clockwise, until the cards run out. A 52-card pack comes out level only at two, four or thirteen players, and a one- or two-card difference does not matter anyway. Some groups leave the two jokers in so that 54 cards divide evenly at three, six or nine. If you do leave them in, say what they do. One common arrangement makes the pile slappable the moment a joker appears; another treats a joker as an ordinary card that matches nothing; another again has it reverse the direction of play.

Nobody looks at any card at any point, their own stack included. Square your cards into a neat face-down stack in front of you and keep it squared: you play off the top and add winnings to the bottom, so a sloppy stack slows you down and lets people see cards early.

Before the first card is turned, agree on two things out loud. First, which slap patterns are live. Doubles and sandwiches are near-universal and top-bottom is close behind; marriages, tens and runs are extras, and every group plays a different set. Second, what a false slap costs, normally one card burned to the bottom of the pile, sometimes two. Arguments about these mid-game are what the game is famous for.

The player to the dealer's left turns the first card. Play runs clockwise.

Play

On your turn, take the top card off your own stack and flip it face up onto the pile in the middle. Grab it by the far edge and turn it away from you, so that everyone sees it at the same moment. Turning a card toward yourself gives you a fraction of a second's head start on slapping and is treated as cheating.

If the card is a 2 through 10 and does not complete a slap pattern, nothing happens and the turn simply passes to the next player.

FACE CARD CHALLENGES

Jacks, queens, kings and aces stop the normal rotation. When you turn one, the next player owes you a face card, and the rank you played sets how many attempts they get:

• jack: 1 card
• queen: 2 cards
• king: 3 cards
• ace: 4 cards

That player flips cards from their own stack onto the pile, one at a time, up to that limit. Two outcomes are possible.

If one of the cards they flip is itself a face card or an ace, they stop immediately, even if they had attempts left. The challenge now passes to the player after them, with the count reset by whatever rank was just turned. Challenges can chain around the table several times and the pile gets fat.

If they use up all their attempts without turning a face card or ace, the challenge is over. The player who turned the most recent face card takes the entire pile, puts it face down under their own stack, and turns the first card of a brand-new pile. Play then carries on clockwise from that player, exactly as it does after a slap.

Note that the cards flipped during a challenge are ordinary cards on the pile. They can and do complete slap patterns, which is where most of the chaos comes from.

SLAPPING

Slapping outranks everything, including a challenge in progress. The instant the top of the pile completes a live pattern, anyone at the table may slap it, including the player who just turned the card and including players who are not part of the current challenge. The first hand onto the pile takes the whole thing, adds it face down to the bottom of their stack, and turns the first card of the next pile. Play then continues clockwise from them. Any face-card challenge that was in progress dies with the pile: once the cards have been carried off, nobody owes anybody a face card. Won cards go under your stack in the order you gathered them, never shuffled, which is what makes the pile worth remembering: a double you saw collected comes round again, and next time there may be a card between the two.

The two patterns every table plays:

• Double: the top two cards match in rank, for example 7 then 7.
• Sandwich: two matching ranks with exactly one card standing between them, for example 9, 4, 9.

Top-bottom is nearly as common and is the first one to add: it is live when the card just turned matches the rank of the card at the very bottom of the pile. It only works if somebody remembers what that bottom card was, which is why some groups drop it.

Further additions, all of which must be agreed before the first card is turned: marriage, a king and queen next to each other in either order; a hoagie, which is a double with exactly two cards between rather than one; tens, two cards whose ranks add to exactly ten, counting an ace as one and jacks, queens and kings as nothing at all — and being nothing, a court card between the two is stepped over rather than breaking them up, so 6 then 4 is live and so is ace, king, 9; and runs, four or more cards in consecutive rank order either up or down with suits ignored, ace low unless you also allow it to run king-ace-two.

Suits never matter for any pattern.

If several hands land at once, accounts differ on who takes it: some give the pile to the hand underneath all the others, or to whichever hand has most of the cards under it; others to whoever has the most fingers on top. Settle which before you start.

BURNING

Slap when there is no pattern and you burn a card. Take the top card of your own stack, without looking at it, and slide it face down underneath the pile. You get nothing for it; it becomes part of whatever pile the next winner collects. Some groups burn two cards, and some make a player who false-slaps repeatedly sit out slapping for the rest of the game.

RUNNING OUT OF CARDS

Playing your last card does not eliminate you. You stay at the table with an empty space in front of you and you may still slap. Win a slap and the entire pile comes to you, and you are back in with a large stack. This is why the game can run so long: a player who is down to nothing can be the leader thirty seconds later.

While you have no cards you are skipped in the rotation: nobody waits for you to turn anything, and the turn passes straight on to the next player who still has a stack. How long you keep the right to slap back in is where accounts differ, and it is the thing to settle before you start, because it decides whether the game can end at all. Some let a cardless player go on slapping only while at least two players still hold cards; others let them slap in for as long as the game lasts.

If you run out in the middle of answering a face-card challenge you cannot produce what you owe, and accounts split again on what follows: either the challenge dies there and the player who turned the last face card takes the pile, or the next player round picks up whatever chances were left. A cardless player who false-slaps has nothing to burn; one arrangement gives them a strike instead, with three strikes ending their right to slap for the rest of the game.

Goal & scoring

There is no scoring. You win by holding every card in play, which is 52 with a single pack, 54 if you left the jokers in and 104 with two packs. In practice that means everyone else has been knocked out and you are the only player with a stack in front of you.

Getting all the way there can take a while, because a cardless player who slaps well comes straight back into the game, and a full-table game can swing several times before anyone is genuinely eliminated. It is entirely normal for one player to hold forty cards and lose ten minutes later.

Because of that, plenty of groups set a stopping point in advance: play for a fixed twenty or thirty minutes and give the win to whoever has the biggest stack, or stop as soon as the table is down to two players and call the larger stack the winner. Decide before you start rather than when someone is winning.

The skill is not really reflexes. It is watching the pile rather than your own hand, knowing the pattern list cold so you are not thinking about it, and resisting the twitch slap, because burned cards add up faster than anyone expects.

Variants

Long slap list — Beyond doubles and sandwiches, groups pile on extra patterns: marriage (king and queen adjacent, either order), hoagie (a double with two cards between), tens (two cards adding to exactly ten), top-bottom, four or more cards in consecutive rank order, a flush of three or more cards in one suit, a 6 and a 9 together, which some lists call the ratscrew, jokers as an instant slap, and a designated card such as the queen of spades that is always slappable. More patterns mean more piles change hands and fewer long face-card chains, but they also mean far more disputed slaps, so write the list down if it goes past four items.

Flat face-card counts — Instead of jack one, queen two, king three, ace four, every face card and ace gives the next player the same number of attempts, usually one. This is much easier to teach. Challenges resolve faster and piles stay smaller, which makes the game shorter but takes away the tension of watching someone burn through four chances on an ace. A different rearrangement swaps the ends rather than flattening them, so that a jack gives three chances and a king one.

Harsher false-slap penalty — Instead of burning one card to the bottom of the pile, a false slapper burns two, or hands a card face down to every other player, which on a full table is brutal. A milder alternative used with children is a strike system: three false slaps and you lose the right to slap until the next game. All of these exist to stop the one player who slaps at everything and wins on volume.

Slapping in from outside — Extend the right to slap beyond the table: spectators who never dealt in at all may slap the pile alongside anyone knocked out of it, and a successful slap brings them in with the whole pile as their stack. It keeps everyone involved rather than leaving people watching, at the cost of a game that may never actually end. It is sometimes capped, for example by allowing a player one re-entry only.

Two packs for a big table — Above six players a single deck gives everyone six or seven cards and the game turns over almost instantly, so shuffle two packs together. Duplicate ranks make doubles and sandwiches noticeably more frequent, so the pile moves faster and face-card chains break sooner. Deal it out the same way and keep every other rule identical.

Background

This is a modern American game built on a very old British one. Take Beggar-My-Neighbour, the 19th-century British game of paying for face cards, and add the rule that certain combinations may be won by slapping the pile: what comes out is Egyptian Ratscrew. The slapping itself may not be original either — it may have been borrowed from Slapjack rather than invented here.

That descent explains the shape of the game. Everything to do with face cards and paying for them is inherited and fixed, and every argument you will ever have is about the slapping, which is the part that was bolted on and never standardised. It also explains why the name is such a mess: the same game answers to ERS, Egyptian War, Bloodystump, Ratslap and plain Slap.

• classic
• family-friendly
• large-group
• luck
• party
• reflex
• speed

Rules checked against Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards, Denexa Games, Official Game Rules, Game Rules, Gambiter, Group Games 101, Wikibooks, PlayingCardDecks.

Euchre

Also known as Eucre, Euker

Players

3-6 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck stripped to 24 cards (A, K, Q, J, 10, 9 in each suit)

Time

20-40 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Four players in two fixed partnerships, partners seated opposite each other. Strip a standard pack down to 24 cards: ace, king, queen, jack, ten and nine in each of the four suits. Nothing lower is used.

For the first dealer, turn cards face up one at a time around the table and give the deal to whoever receives the first black jack. After that the deal passes clockwise every hand.

Deal five cards to each player clockwise in two rounds, three to a player then two, or two then three. Whichever pattern you start with, keep it for the rest of that deal. That accounts for twenty cards. Stack the remaining four face down in the middle as the kitty and turn its top card face up. That upcard is the suit on offer in the first round of bidding.

Do not sort your hand yet, because ranking is not fixed until trump is settled. In the three plain suits cards run ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine from high to low. In trump the order is right bower (the jack of the trump suit, the best card in the deck), then left bower — the matching jack in the other suit of its colour — then ace, king, queen, ten, nine. The left bower does not merely rank as trump, it belongs to trump for the whole hand. With spades as trump the jack of clubs is a spade: you may not use it to follow a club lead, and you must play it to a spade lead if it is your only spade. The trump suit therefore holds seven cards and the same-color suit only five.

Keep score on paper, or with the traditional pair of spare low cards laid face down and turned to show the count.

Play

First round of bidding. The turned card offers its suit as trump. Starting on the dealer's left and going clockwise, everyone in turn either takes that offer or passes it along. Accepting is called ordering it up if you are one of the dealer's opponents, assisting if you are the dealer's partner, and taking it up if you are the dealer. As soon as somebody accepts, bidding stops: the dealer adds the upcard to hand and buries any one card face down under the kitty, going back to five cards. The side that chose trump are the makers, the other pair the defenders.

Second round of bidding. If all four pass, the dealer turns the upcard face down on the kitty and the auction goes round once more from the dealer's left. Now a player may pass or name any suit as trump except the suit just turned down. Naming the other suit of the same color is called next; naming either suit of the opposite color is cross, or green. Nobody exchanges cards in the second round, and the kitty is finished with. If all four pass again the hand is dead: throw the cards in and pass the deal. Under the very common stick-the-dealer rule the dealer is instead forced to name a suit rather than let the hand die.

Going alone. Once trump is settled and before a card is led, any player may declare a loner — the maker, or either defender. That player's partner lays all five cards face down and takes no part in the hand, so a lone maker plays one against two and a lone defender two against one. If both sides put somebody up alone, everybody else is out of it and the deal comes down to two players and ten cards. The declaration has to come before the opening lead; you cannot decide to go alone once play has started.

Playing the tricks. The player to the dealer's left leads to the first trick — except when somebody is playing alone, in which case the lead belongs to the player on the loner's left instead. Where both sides have gone alone, the defender leads. Each player in turn clockwise must follow the suit led if holding a card of it. A player who cannot follow may play anything at all, trump included. There is no obligation to trump and no obligation to beat what has already been played. A trump on the trick beats everything that is not one, and the biggest trump takes it. Untrumped, it falls to whoever played highest in the led suit. The winner of a trick leads to the next. Five tricks are played and the hand is then scored.

The bower trap. Two situations catch new players, and both come from the left bower changing suit. With hearts as trump, a diamond lead cannot be answered by the jack of diamonds at all: that card has become a heart. And when hearts are led, a player holding that same jack and nothing else red is not void after all — the jack is their heart, and down it goes.

Reneging. Failing to follow suit when you were able to is a renege. Club and tournament practice is to stop the hand the moment the fault is spotted and move 2 points — awarded to the innocent side, or deducted from the offenders, depending on the group. Casual tables more often finish the hand out and simply deny the offending side any score for it. Both are in use, so agree which applies before you deal.

Four of the twenty-four cards never reach a hand, so besides the upcard three cards stay unknown all deal. That, along with the dealer's buried discard, is what makes tracking the seven trump cards worth the effort.

Goal & scoring

A side wins by being first to 10 points. Points come only from the outcome of a hand; individual tricks are worth nothing on their own, and the defenders score nothing at all whenever the makers succeed.

Score at the end of each hand as follows:

• Makers win three or four tricks: 1 point.
• Makers win all five, called a march: 2 points.
• A lone maker wins three or four tricks: 1 point.
• A lone maker wins all five: 4 points.
• Makers win fewer than three tricks: they are euchred, and the defenders take 2 points.
• A lone defender euchres the makers: 4 points to the defenders.

Note the asymmetry on a loner. Going alone and succeeding pays two extra points, while going alone and failing costs nothing extra — a euchre pays 2 unless it was a lone defender who did the euchring. Note also that ordering up hands the makers all the risk: a euchre is worth as much as a march, which is why a side sitting on 8 or 9 points is dangerous to bid against.

Only one side can score in any given hand, so the two totals never advance together and there is no way for both sides to reach the target at once: the moment a side's total hits 10 the game stops and that side has won. No tie-break is needed.

Games are usually a race to 10. Playing to 11 is common in some regions, and league play sometimes uses a fixed number of hands with the higher total winning instead of a target score, in which case an equal total is normally settled by playing one more hand.

Variants

Stick the dealer — Also called screw the dealer. If the first three players pass in the second round of bidding, the dealer may not pass and must name one of the three eligible suits. It removes thrown-in hands entirely, speeds the game up, and creates the game's most reliable pressure point, since the dealer is often forced into a suit they would never have called voluntarily. Widespread enough that many tables treat it as standard rather than a variation.

Cutthroat (three-handed) Euchre — Three players, no partnerships, the same 24-card deck and the same five-card hands. Fifteen cards are dealt, the nine left over form the kitty, and its top card is turned up exactly as in the four-handed game. Whoever names trump plays alone against the other two, who cooperate for that hand only. The maker scores 1 point for three or four tricks and 3 points for all five, though some groups pay only 2 for the march; if the maker is euchred, each of the two defenders scores 2. First to 10 wins. The temporary alliances make it a very different bidding game from the partnership version.

The Benny (25-card Euchre) — A joker, sometimes replaced by the two of spades, is added to the deck as the Benny or best bower: the highest trump no matter which suit is trump. Holding it guarantees a trick. If the Benny is turned up as the upcard, the dealer names the trump suit. Common in Britain, Australia and parts of Canada, often alongside a target of 11 points rather than 10.

Bid Euchre — An auction version, usually with a larger deck (frequently 24 or 32 cards, or two packs combined for more players), in which players bid a specific number of tricks rather than simply accepting or naming trump. The high bidder names trump, and scoring is by tricks won rather than by the fixed 1, 2 and 4 point table. A side that fails to reach its bid loses points equal to the bid. It scales to five and six players more comfortably than standard Euchre.

No loner after passing — A restriction some tables put on going alone: a player who passed in the round that trump was eventually made in may not then play alone. It exists to stop somebody passing on a strong hand, waiting for an opponent to be talked into naming trump, and then going alone against them for the 4 points a lone euchre pays. Worth agreeing on, because without it the trap is available to anybody patient enough to use it.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, World Euchre Federation, Ohio Euchre, Trickster Cards.

Fan Tan

Also known as Sevens, Parliament, Play or Pay, Card Dominoes, Sjuan

Players

3-8 players (best with 5)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards); counters or chips if you want the pool

Time

15-30 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Shedding

Setup

One warning about the name. There is a Chinese banking game called fan-tan, played by covering a heap of beads or buttons with a bowl and betting on how many will be left when they are counted off in fours. It has no cards in it and nothing to do with this. The name is also attached to a card game that opens with the aces rather than the sevens, deals the cards left over into a stock you draw from when you cannot enter, and builds each suit in one direction only, from the ace up to the king. Ask for Sevens if you want to be unambiguous.

Three to eight can play, and one account puts the best game at four to six; a short table makes it too easy and a long one leaves you waiting. Anyone deals first and the deal moves left afterwards.

Deal every card out, one at a time and clockwise, starting to the dealer's left. Unless there are exactly four of you the hands will come out uneven, and that is fine — the larger hands sit earliest in the rotation and get their turns first, and the deal moves round anyway.

Aces rank above kings, so each suit runs from the two at the bottom to the ace at the top, with the seven in the middle where the game starts.

Keep the middle of the table clear. It has to hold four rows of thirteen cards before the game is over, so if space is tight, agree now to stack the high cards on the eight and the low cards on the six rather than spreading everything out.

If you are playing for chips — the version some editions of Hoyle print under the name Fan Tan — everybody antes one into a pool before the deal.

Play

The card at the centre of everything is the seven. A seven is the only card that can start a suit off, and once one is down, that suit's row grows outwards from it a card at a time: the eight and then the nine and so on up towards the ace on one side, the six and then the five and so on down towards the two on the other.

The player to the dealer's left goes first and, since the table is empty, can only put down a seven or pass. Play then goes clockwise.

At your turn you play exactly one card, and you have no choice about whether to play. If anything in your hand fits — a seven to open a new suit, or a card that sits immediately next to the end of a row already going — you must put it down. Only when nothing in your hand fits may you pass, and passing with a playable card is cheating rather than tactics. In the chip version it is also expensive. A pass at will is allowed in some versions, which makes holding a card back ordinary play rather than something you have to get away with; settle which you are playing before the deal.

That single restriction is what makes the game more than an exercise in doing as you are told. You usually have a choice of several legal cards, and which one you let go decides what everyone else can do next:

• Holding a seven back shuts a whole suit down for as long as you can avoid being forced, and you can only do it while some other card of yours is playable. The moment the seven is your only legal card, down it goes.
• Cards close to a seven open a suit up for everybody. Cards near the ends of a row close it down. Playing towards the middle is generous; playing at the extremes is not.
• The player who is short of a suit entirely has nothing to fear from it, and the player holding the two and the ace of one suit will be stuck with them until the whole of that row is laid.

The hand ends the moment somebody plays their last card. Many tables carry on afterwards to settle who came second, third and last, which matters if you are scoring by what is left in hand.

Goal & scoring

Empty your hand before anyone else does. At a table playing for nothing that is the whole of it, and the game is perfectly good played that way.

If you want a running score there are two established ways of keeping one, they pull play in opposite directions, and it is worth choosing between them deliberately rather than by whatever is nearest to hand.

Counting the cards you failed to shed prices the extremes. Everyone still holding cards when the winner goes out totals them as penalty points — pip value for the numbers, ten apiece for the courts, and fifteen for an ace, though some accounts price the ace at one instead — and the lowest total after an agreed number of deals wins. Where the ace counts fifteen it is the dearest card in the pack, and it sits at the top end of a row just past the king, so that tally pushes the whole table towards laying rows out fast and shedding the top of each suit early. Loose, quick and forgiving.

A pool prices being stuck. Chips go in before the deal and again each time somebody passes; the winner takes the pool and is then paid for every card still sitting in everyone else's hand. Nothing in that arithmetic cares which cards you hold, only how many, so blocking stays worth doing and the game stays tight. This is the version some editions of Hoyle print, under the names Fan Tan and Play or Pay.

One thing to settle before the first deal either way, rather than after the argument: what it costs to pass when you could have played. The temptation is specific and hard to prove after the fact — a player quietly sitting on a seven can bottle a suit up for rounds at a time. Make the fine unpleasant, and make it worse for a seven.

Variants

A named seven leads — Rather than letting the player on the dealer's left choose which suit opens, the holder of one particular card must lead it, and everything else follows from there. The seven of hearts opens the Swedish Sjuan and the Indian Satti Centre, the seven of clubs the Finnish Ristiseiska, and one account nominates the seven of diamonds instead. It removes the game's first decision, which is a small loss, and guarantees somebody can move on turn one, which at a big table is a real gain.

Six and eight before anything else — A seven blocks its own suit: nothing further of it can go down until both the six and the eight have joined it. Played in Finland as Ristiseiska and in Germany as Siebener raus. Accounts vary on the detail: one fixes the order at the six and then the eight, one asks only for the eight before the rest of the suit opens, and one puts the eight before the six. The effect is much stronger than it sounds: a suit cannot start running away in one direction, three specific cards have to surface before the row does anything at all, and holding the six or the eight becomes as powerful as holding the seven itself. Expect more passing and a longer game.

Shichi Narabe — The Japanese form. Everyone lays every seven they hold onto the table before the first turn, so all four rows are open from the start and there is no suit to strangle. In exchange, passing becomes a scarce resource: you may pass three times in a game. Some accounts add that a fourth pass puts you out, laying your remaining cards into their places on the table. Since the sevens are spent immediately, the game is entirely about which end of which row you feed.

Cinquillo — The Spanish version, played with the 40-card Spanish pack — an ordinary deck with the 8s, 9s and 10s removed will do. Each suit has ten cards rather than thirteen, so the rows are opened by the fives instead of the sevens, and the five of coins must be the first card of the game. Shorter and tighter than the full-deck version.

Ace low — Put the ace at the bottom of each suit, below the two, rather than at the top above the king. Each row then runs from the ace up to the king. It changes nothing structurally, and under a tally that prices the ace at fifteen it changes the shape of the risk: the dearest card in the pack moves from the top of each row to the bottom, so it and the courts can no longer strand you at the same end. Worth agreeing before the deal rather than discovering mid-hand.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• kids
• large-group
• quick
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards.

Five Card Draw

Also known as Draw Poker, Five-Card Draw, Jackpots

Players

2-6 players (best with 6)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), plus chips or counters for everyone

Time

20-60 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Bluffing

Setup

This is the poker most people picture when they picture poker: five private cards, one chance to swap some of them, and nothing at all on the table. Nobody ever sees a card that is not their own until the hands are compared, which makes it the shortest set of rules in the family and the sensible one to learn first.

Two people can play and six is about the ceiling, and the arithmetic sets that ceiling rather than taste: a player can consume eight cards in a hand, five dealt and three drawn, and six times eight is forty-eight of the fifty-two. Seven or eight can sit down, but then the pack can run dry part-way through the draw, which is why six is both the usual stated maximum and generally reckoned the best game.

Cards rank ace high, with the ace also serving as the low end of a five-high run. Suits never break a tie; equal hands divide the pot.

Give everyone chips and agree the stakes before anything is dealt. Decide at the same time whether betting is fixed-limit, which is traditional and keeps a home game friendly, or no-limit.

Every hand opens with an ante: each player pushes a small chip into the middle before the cards come out, so there is a pot worth playing for from the first turn. Rotate the deal clockwise after each hand, since dealing last is a real advantage and should be shared.

The dealer shuffles, offers a cut to the player on the right, and deals five cards to each player one at a time face down, going clockwise and starting on their own left. What is left of the pack stays face down in front of the dealer; it is the stock the draw comes from.

Play

THE FIRST BETTING ROUND

Pick up your five cards and keep them hidden. Betting opens on the dealer's left and runs clockwise. On your turn you may check while nobody has bet, bet if the round is still unopened, call the current amount, raise it, or fold and drop out. The round ends when every player who has not folded has put in the same amount and everyone has had a turn. Under the usual fixed limit a round allows a bet and four raises, after which the betting is capped and the remaining players may only call or fold. If nobody bets at all, the hand is over before it has begun: the cards are thrown in, the deal passes on, and the antes stay in the middle with everyone adding another to them, so the pot grows until somebody is willing to open.

THE DRAW

Starting with the first active player clockwise from the dealer, each player in turn says how many cards they want to change, slides that many face down toward the dealer, and is immediately dealt the same number of replacements from the top of the stock. Announce the number rather than silently pushing cards out, and wait while the dealer counts them; when the exchange moves on to the next player you should be holding exactly five, and any other total kills the hand. Sequence matters as much as arithmetic. Discards leave first and replacements arrive second, with no overlap between the two, which is what makes it impossible to accuse anyone of picking what to throw once they had already seen what came back.

Keeping all five is standing pat, and it is announced out loud like any other choice. The dealer draws last and serves themselves.

How many you may change is a house matter, so settle it before the first deal, along with whether the dealer burns a card off the top before dealing replacements — some do and some do not. Three is the common cap. Many home games allow a fourth card if you show the ace you are keeping, and games of five or fewer players often let you change all five. At a full table of six the cap has to stay at three or the pack will not stretch.

A stock that empties partway through the draw gets rebuilt rather than abandoned. What comes back is what earlier drawers traded away, together with any card burned and the bottom card of the pack where a table sets those aside; that heap is shuffled and cut, and the deal resumes from where it stalled. Folded hands stay dead. One set of cards is deliberately held back from it: whatever the player currently waiting on replacements has just pushed out, since the whole point of the exercise is defeated if somebody is handed back the very cards they chose to be rid of. None of this is workable unless the discards have been stacked neatly face down all along, so keep them that way from the first exchange.

THE SECOND BETTING ROUND

A second round, opening with the same player who opened the first and following exactly the same rules. This is the round that carries the game's information: how many cards each opponent took is the only public fact anyone has, and it is the thing you are reading and the thing you are dressing up. A player who stood pat is claiming something very strong and may well hold nothing.

THE SHOWDOWN

If two or more players remain, hands go face up. The player who made the last bet or raise shows first; if the round was checked around, the first remaining player clockwise from the dealer shows first. Anyone who is beaten may throw the hand in face down rather than reveal it.

The moment every other player folds, the last one standing takes the pot and shows nothing at all. That happens often, and it is a legitimate way to win rather than a lesser one.

Goal & scoring

The object is the pot in the middle, and you get it one of two ways: by holding the best five-card hand when the hands are compared, or by betting in such a way that everyone else gives up first. Nothing is scored on paper and nothing carries from hand to hand; what you have is the chips in front of you.

Hands are compared by the standard poker categories. Ties within a category are broken by the ranks involved, highest first, and then by the remaining cards one at a time as kickers. Two hands that match on every card split the pot evenly, with any odd chip going to the player closest to the dealer's left. Since all five of your cards are yours alone, exact ties are far rarer here than in games built on shared cards.

A player who has run out of chips mid-hand may put in everything they have left and stay in for a proportional share: they can win from each opponent only as much as they themselves contributed, and any surplus is set aside as a side pot for the players still betting.

A session ends whenever the table decides. Count the chips, settle whatever the stakes were, and the person with the most in front of them has won.

Variants

Jacks or better (jackpots) — The oldest fix for a game where everyone checks and nothing happens. No one may open the first betting round without holding at least a pair of jacks, and the opener has to be able to prove it after the hand. If the whole table passes, the cards are gathered and dealt again with the antes left where they are, so the pot swells until somebody finally holds an opening hand. The requirement is sometimes raised to a pair of aces on a redeal.

Lowball — The ranking is turned upside down and the worst hand takes the pot, which changes what a draw is for entirely. Under the ace-to-five version the ace counts low and straights and flushes are ignored, so the perfect hand is five-four-three-two-ace. Under deuce-to-seven the ace is always high and straights and flushes count against you, making seven-five-four-three-two of mixed suits the best possible holding. Both are usually dealt with blinds rather than antes.

Blinds instead of antes — Borrowed from the modern casino games and now common online. Rather than everyone contributing equally before the deal, the two players clockwise from the dealer post a small and a big forced bet, and the first betting round opens with the player after them. It shifts the pressure onto rotating seats instead of taxing everybody every hand, and it pairs naturally with a no-limit betting structure.

Wild cards — A staple of kitchen-table games: some rank is declared wild and stands for whatever its holder needs, deuces wild being the usual choice, sometimes with jokers added to the pack. Agree beforehand whether five of a kind is possible and where it sits, since it beats even a straight flush. Wild cards inflate every hand at the table, so a full house stops being worth much and hand values need rethinking from scratch.

• beginner-friendly
• betting
• bluffing
• classic
• strategy
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, PokerNews, CardPlayer, PokerListings, Pokerology, Official Game Rules, Wikipedia.

Five Hundred

Also known as 500

Players

3-5 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck cut down to 43 cards — A to 5 in the black suits, A to 4 in the red suits, plus one joker

Time

45-90 minutes

Difficulty

Complex

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Four at the table in two partnerships, each pair facing one another. Pick a first dealer however you like; from then on everything in this game — dealing, bidding, playing — travels to the left.

The pack is not one you own, so build it. Take a standard deck and throw out every 2 and every 3, then the 4 of spades and the 4 of clubs as well. Put one joker back in. Forty-three cards are left: the black suits running from the ace down to the five, the red suits down to the four, and the joker belonging to no suit at all.

Each player gets ten cards, and three go to the centre of the table face down as the kitty. The traditional rhythm interleaves them: three each and one to the kitty, four each and one to the kitty, three each and the last to the kitty.

One score sheet, two columns, running from zero in both directions. Both directions matters — a side can lose this game by going far enough backwards, and a column that only counts up will not show it coming.

What you are setting up is Euchre with the lid off. The turned-up card is gone and an auction decides trumps instead; whoever wins that auction gets three cards nobody else has seen; hands run to ten rather than five; and one of the contracts on the ladder is an undertaking to lose every trick on purpose. Australia treats the game as a national institution and had nothing to do with inventing it. The game is American and older than 1900, and a playing-card company there took it up and copyrighted a set of rules for it in 1904.

Play

The auction opens to the dealer's left and goes round as many times as it needs to. Pass and you are out of it for good. Everything else is a claim on a number of tricks, six at the least, played some particular way:

• A number and a suit. Bid eight diamonds and your side has to come home with eight of the ten tricks or better, diamonds being trump.
• A number and no trumps. The same undertaking with no trump suit at all.
• Misère: you will lose every trick, playing alone while your partner lays their hand face down and sits it out.
• Open misère: the same, except that after the first trick you spread your hand face up on the table and play the rest of it in plain view.

Bids outrank each other by tricks first and then by suit, and the suit order is the one thing to memorise: spades lowest, then clubs, diamonds, hearts, and no trumps highest. Six spades is the cheapest bid available and ten no trumps the dearest. The two misères are slotted into that ladder by agreement rather than by trick count, and where they sit is not agreed everywhere. A plain misère sits above every bid of seven and below every bid of eight, and may only be called once somebody has actually bid seven; an open misère outranks ten diamonds, ranks under ten hearts, and may be called at any point, including as the opening bid. Note what that does to the plain misère: at 250 it is worth more than the eight spades it ranks below, and other tables put it between eight spades and eight clubs instead, where its price belongs. That is the ordinary placement in the American game, and it is worth naming before the first auction.

Everyone passing throws the hand in.

The last bidder standing takes the kitty into hand without showing it, then buries any three cards face down — the discards may include cards that came out of the kitty. Those three are out of the game. The contractor then makes the opening lead.

Play itself holds no surprises. Follow the suit led while you hold it and throw whatever you like once you do not; the biggest trump in a trick takes it, and with no trump present the best card of the led suit does; whoever collects a trick leads to the next.

What is not orthodox is the size of the trump suit. Two cards join it and none leaves, so it runs twelve deep when a black suit is trump and thirteen when a red one is, against the ten or eleven an ordinary suit holds in this pack. On top of it is the joker. Under the joker, the right bower, meaning trump's own jack. Under that, the left bower — the matching jack from the suit of the same colour, which has abandoned its printed suit completely and counts as a trump for every purpose there is, following suit included. Then the ace, the king, the queen and straight on down to the ten, since both jacks are elsewhere. The suit that shares trump's colour is left nine or ten cards long with no jack at all.

The joker without a trump suit to belong to needs its own set of rules, and they are worth reading before a no-trump or misère contract rather than during one:

• The contractor, if holding it, may nominate a suit for it before the opening lead, and it is then simply the top card of that suit.
• Unnominated, it belongs to no suit, beats everything, and is restricted instead. Following someone else's lead you may only play it when void in the suit led. Under a misère you must play it when void; under a no-trump contract you need not, and may keep it back.
• You may lead the joker and name a suit that everyone else must follow. How far that privilege runs is not settled between the accounts. On the stricter reading it reaches only a suit nobody has opened yet and expires once all four have been led, the last trick of the hand excepted. The looser reading puts no limit on it at all: the joker may be led whenever you please and named into any suit, including one you hold cards in. Agree which you are playing before a no-trump contract, because it decides whether a joker in hand is a certain trick or a card you can be stuck with.

One trap follows from all that. A misère bidder who keeps the joker and forgets to nominate a suit for it has already lost the contract, because the joker will win the trick it is played to and there is nothing to be done about it.

Goal & scoring

Five hundred points wins, which is where the name comes from, and there is a condition on it that decides real games: whether arriving there is enough on its own. In the antipodean game it is not — you have to get there on a hand you bid and made, so points picked up defending somebody else's contract will carry you past 500 and leave you sitting there unable to finish, playing on until you win a contract of your own. American practice is the other way and lets those points win outright, giving the game to the contractor if both sides cross 500 on the same deal. Settle it before you start. There is also a back door, and on that both accounts agree. Reach minus 500 and you have lost the game outright, without anyone having to win it.

What a contract is worth looks like a table to memorise and is really one formula. Six spades is 40. Every extra trick you undertake adds 100, and every step up the suit order — spades to clubs to diamonds to hearts to no trumps — adds 20. So eight hearts is 40, plus 200 for the two tricks above six, plus 60 for hearts being three steps above spades: 300. The two misères are priced flat, at 250 and 500, and their prices do not line up with the ladder: 250 is worth more than the eight spades a plain misère is outbid by.

Take the tricks you bid and your side scores the contract's value. Extra tricks beyond the bid earn nothing at all, with one exception: sweep all ten and a contract worth less than 250 pays 250 instead. Above 250 there is no bonus, because you were already being paid enough.

Fall short and the same number comes off your score instead, which is how a side ends up going out backwards. A greedy ten no trumps that fails costs 520 in a single hand and can lose the game on its own.

The defenders score 10 a trick for every trick they take, and they score it whether the contract stood up or not. This matters more than it looks: it means defending is never wasted effort, a hopeless hand is still worth fighting for scraps in, and a side can climb most of the way to 500 on other people's contracts — only to find, where a bid is required to go out, that they still have to win one to close it.

Misère pays nothing to the defenders either way. The contractor either loses every trick and takes 250 or 500, or wins one and drops the same amount.

Variants

Three-handed — Cut the pack down again so that the seven is the lowest card in every suit, giving 33 cards with the joker, and deal ten each with a three-card kitty as usual. There are no fixed partnerships: whoever wins the auction plays alone and the other two combine against them for that hand only. Every player keeps their own score, and the same conditions apply — 500 or more on a contract of your own wins, minus 500 loses. The contractor gets no help at all, and the two defenders have to work out between them who is covering what, having agreed nothing beforehand. One change to the bidding goes with the smaller table: a misère may be called without anyone having bid seven first, seven-trick bids being rarer with no partner to lean on.

Five-handed — Use the whole 52-card deck plus the joker, 53 in all, and deal ten each with the usual kitty. After discarding, a contractor playing a suit or no-trump contract either announces they are going alone against the other four, or calls a single card to find a partner by: whoever holds it plays alongside them, two against three. Which cards may be called is not settled — one account bars the joker and both bowers, another has a bower as the ordinary choice and bars trumps only at some tables — and neither is whether the holder owns up at once or keeps quiet, leaving the partnership to surface when the card is played. In some circles a contractor may also name a card they hold themselves or have already buried, which is how you play alone without announcing it. A called partner shares the contract's value or its loss, half each on one account and the full amount each on another; a contractor going alone takes all of it. Misère is played single-handed against the other four wherever it is allowed at all, and both accounts report it barred or repriced at this size as too easy for its score.

Six-handed — Two partnerships of three, sitting alternately, playing by the four-handed rules. It wants a purpose-made 63-card pack with 11s and 12s in every suit and 13s in the red suits, ranking between the 10 and the jack — these are sold as six-handed 500 decks, and one account reports Australian players using the same pack for the four-handed game with the extras taken out. Without one, make the count up out of a second pack: its 2s, its 3s and its red 4s. Agree in advance that when the same card lands twice in a trick, the earlier of the two takes it. Under a misère both of the contractor's partners lay their hands down. Six can also be played as three pairs rather than two threes.

The joker in no trumps — How the joker behaves without a trump suit is one of the game's recognised areas of dispute, and it is the thing to agree out loud rather than discover in the middle of a 500-point contract. Two changes turn up in both accounts. The first tightens the joker: it may not be played to a suit you have already shown void in, so having thrown a spade on somebody's diamond lead you cannot come back and take a later diamond with it. One account exempts the case where the joker is the last card you hold; the other says that in exactly that position it loses the trick to the best card of the suit led. The second change loosens the lead instead, letting the joker be led to any trick at all and named into any suit you have not shown void in, whether or not that suit has been opened. Two narrower forms are also recorded. In one, the joker cannot open a trick until the final one, and serves only to take a suit you are void in. In the other, you may put it down in a given suit at your first card of that suit or at your last, and nowhere between. One account further describes tables that drop the advance nomination in no-trump contracts while keeping it available for a misère.

• classic
• counting
• long-game
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, GameRules.com.

Forty Thieves

Also known as Napoleon at St Helena, Big Forty, Roosevelt at San Juan, Le Cadran

Players

1 player

Deck

2 standard decks (104 cards)

Time

20-45 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Solitaire (1 player)

Setup

Shuffle two full 52-card decks together into a single 104-card pack. Deal 40 cards face up into ten columns of four, going across the row so each column takes one card per pass, and overlap them so every rank stays readable. Nothing is concealed: all forty are in plain sight before you touch anything.

The rest of the pack goes face down as the stock, with a space beside it for the waste. Above the tableau, leave room for eight foundations — each suit is built twice, once from each deck.

Clear a broad table first. Two decks in ten columns need considerably more space than any one-deck game, and by mid-play a single column can run past a dozen cards.

Play

The eight foundations climb in suit from the ace — two spade piles, two heart piles, two of each of the others, every one running ace to king. A card sent to a foundation is finished with. It cannot be brought back down, which turns each promotion into a decision rather than a reflex.

The ten columns build downward in suit and in suit only. The 9 of spades goes on the 10 of spades and nowhere else at all. Ranks do not wrap round: an ace at the end of a column is the bottom of its run and takes nothing, and a king moves only to an empty column or onto its own foundation. Anyone arriving from Klondike will lay a red card on a black one out of pure habit; there is no colour rule here to reward that.

Then the restriction the game is famous for. Exactly one card moves at a time, always. Your candidates are the exposed card at the end of a column and the card on top of the waste, and either may go to a foundation, onto another column, or into an empty column. Suppose a column ends in the 10, 9, 8 and 7 of spades in perfect order: you still have to relocate them one by one, which means finding homes for three of them before the run can travel anywhere. Nothing anywhere in the rules picks up a group.

An empty column, by contrast, takes any card whatever. Empty columns are the only manoeuvring room the game hands you, and most of Forty Thieves strategy follows from that single fact. A spare column is how you dig out a buried ace, how you reverse a column into a usable order, and how you unload the waste. Getting home typically depends on clearing one or more columns, and emptying one early is the first thing to play for; filling a column back in without a plan is the move that undoes the work.

Turning the stock is your own affair: one card at a time, whenever you choose, with nothing obliging you to wring the tableau dry first. A turned card may go straight onto a column or a foundation if it fits; otherwise it lands on the waste, where only the top card is live and cards come off singly. The stock runs once — 64 cards, 64 turns — and in the strict game it ends there, the stock gone for good. Accounts differ over whether the waste may then be turned and dealt again as a second pass, so settle that before you start. Whatever you strand under an unplayable waste card stays stranded until that card finds a home.

Nothing is compulsory, and holding a card back is often correct. The 5 of diamonds sitting at the end of a column is somewhere to park the 4 of diamonds; on the foundation it is somewhere you no longer have. Aces go up as they appear, and a low card dug out from under a king is worth promoting at once; past that, since a promoted card never comes back, each promotion is worth weighing against the parking space it costs you.

The deal is over when all eight foundations are complete, or when the stock is spent and nothing legal remains. You will usually recognise a loss well before that formal ending: once both copies of a card you need are buried under lower cards in every column, with no empty column in prospect, the position is dead even though moves are still available.

Goal & scoring

You win by completing all eight foundations — every suit built twice, ace through king, all 104 cards off the table. There is nothing in between; the deal is won or it is not.

Traditional play keeps no score. Some computer versions add a Klondike-style arrangement of points per card promoted plus a time bonus.

The figure quoted about this game is its win rate, and it is punishing: the chances of winning have been estimated at about one deal in ten, with getting home turning on whether you can clear a column or two. That is an estimate rather than a measured ceiling, and how many deals would fall to perfect play with every card known is a different question again.

Whether skill or luck decides a deal is genuinely disputed. Some accounts put the outcome down to the order the cards happen to fall and treat the game as very largely luck; others describe it as a test of planning that rewards thinking several moves ahead. Losing is the normal outcome on either account, and the sensible way to keep score is across a session rather than a deal.

Variants

Josephine — The Forty Thieves layout and rules with the one-card restriction dropped: a descending same-suit run at the end of a column may be lifted and moved as a block. The run has to be in order and in suit to travel, and an empty column will accept a whole run as readily as a single card. That one change removes most of the drudgery of shuffling cards through empty columns, and moving built sequences together is one of the commonest variations applied to this game.

Streets — Everything as in Forty Thieves — ten columns of four, eight foundations, one pass through a 64-card stock, one card moved at a time — except that the tableau builds down in alternating colours instead of in suit. Doubling the number of cards that will accept any given card makes a real difference, and it is the natural first step down in difficulty for anyone finding the parent game airless.

Maria — Nine columns of four rather than ten, so 36 cards are dealt and 68 go to the stock, and the tableau builds down in alternating colours. The narrower tableau costs you a column of working space while the colour rule gives back flexibility, and the winning chances have been put at about one deal in eight against roughly one in ten for the parent game. Also recorded as Thirty-six Card Tableau.

Limited — Twelve columns of three, again 36 cards on the table, with the same same-suit building and the same one-card-at-a-time rule as Forty Thieves. Shallow columns mean far less is buried at the outset and two extra columns mean more places to put things, so the opening is much freer even though nothing about the movement rules has been relaxed. Its winning chances have been put at about one deal in five.

Rank and File — Ten columns of four again, but only the last card of each column is dealt face up; the three under it lie face down and turn over as they are uncovered. Ten cards visible at the start where Forty Thieves shows forty, which hands the game the hidden information the parent has none of. The tableau builds down in alternating colours, and a descending run may travel as a block, whole or in part, which the parent game never allows. Hidden cards make the opening harder to read, but the colour rule and the group move together more than pay for them: the winning chances have been put at about one deal in two. Also seen as Dress Parade.

Background

The Napoleon in the name is a story rather than a record. Legend puts this particular game in the exiled emperor's hands on St Helena, and the attribution is at least as old as 1870, when it was first written down under his name — but a legend is all it is, and by some accounts an unlikely one.

The French name Le Cadran, 'the dial', appears in 1874 and points at a possible French origin. Forty Thieves and Big Forty are American names recorded from the 1920s, and Roosevelt at San Juan first turns up in 1939. Collections have gone on printing the game under the Napoleon name more often than any of the others, which is worth knowing if you go looking for it.

Under whichever name, it is the parent of a large two-deck family — Streets, Maria, Limited, Rank and File and a dozen besides — and most of them exist to make the original easier to win.

• classic
• counting
• luck
• solo
• strategy

Rules checked against Wikipedia, Solitaire Central Rulebook, Semicolon Solitaire Rules, BVS Solitaire, Solitaire Association, Denexa Games, SuitedGames, Solitaired.

FreeCell

Also known as Free Cell, FreeCell Solitaire

Players

1 player

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed

Time

10-30 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Solitaire (1 player)

Setup

Take one 52-card deck without jokers, shuffle it, and deal the whole pack face up into eight tableau columns: seven cards each to the first four columns and six each to the last four. Spread each column so that every card in it stays readable, with the last card of the column fully exposed.

Above or beside the tableau, set out four free cells on one side and four foundation spaces on the other. All eight start empty.

That is the entire layout. There is no stock, no waste and no redeal, and nothing is dealt face down. From the first move to the last you are working with complete information, which is what separates FreeCell from Klondike and Spider. No new card can turn up, so a deal is a puzzle that is already either solvable or not before you touch it.

Play

The foundations are built up in suit from the ace to the king, one foundation per suit. The tableau columns are built down in alternating colours, so a black jack accepts a red 10 and that red 10 accepts a black 9.

Strictly speaking exactly one card moves at a time, and it has to be either the exposed card at the end of a column or a card sitting in a free cell. You can send it to:

• a foundation, if it is the next rank up in that suit;
• a tableau column whose end card is one rank higher and the opposite colour;
• an empty free cell, which holds exactly one card and imposes no other condition;
• an empty column, which accepts any single card at all. Unlike Klondike, empty columns are not reserved for kings, and this is the most powerful resource in the game.

A card parked in a free cell is fully available and can be played out again to a column or a foundation whenever it fits. The only cost of using a cell is that it is no longer free for manoeuvring.

Computer versions let you drag a whole run at once, which is the supermove, also called a power move. It is not a separate rule. It is shorthand for a run of ordinary single-card moves that the software performs for you: the upper cards of the run get shuffled into free cells and empty columns, the bottom card is moved, and the run is rebuilt on top of it. The number of cards you can shift this way is therefore capped by the workspace you have:

maximum cards = (1 + empty free cells) x 2 ^ (empty columns)

Read it as two separate effects: every free cell adds one to what you can carry, and every empty column doubles whatever that comes to. Four cells with nothing else spare will therefore shift five cards, and freeing a single column on top of them takes the same four cells to ten. The exception is the destination itself. A column you are moving into cannot double as workspace, so it drops out of the exponent — dropping a run into your only empty column with all four cells free gets you five cards rather than ten.

That is what a careful player can actually achieve by hand, one card at a time. Programs vary in how much of that they manage. Microsoft's own versions up to Windows XP handled one empty column correctly but did not get the most out of two or more, and with no cell free they treated an empty column as though it were a cell. If your version refuses a move you think should be legal, that is usually why. Nothing is lost either way: the supermove is only a convenience, and you can always perform the same transfer one card at a time.

The run you are moving must already be a proper descending, alternating-colour sequence. A stack that merely sits together is not movable as a block, and if you do not have the storage for the whole run you have to break it up by hand.

In the standard game a card sent to a foundation stays there. Some programs let you bring it back down — worrying back, in the English phrase — either as their ordinary rule or as a setting you switch on, so check before you count on it. It matters less than it sounds: across the first hundred million deals, 69 are winnable only that way.

No move is ever compulsory. You are never obliged to send an ace or any other card to a foundation, and holding a low card back in the tableau to catch the next card down is a standard technique. Many programs autoplay cards to the foundations for you once they can no longer be needed; that is a convenience setting, not a rule, and it can usually be switched off.

The deal ends when all four foundations reach their kings, or when you are stuck: all four free cells occupied, no empty column, and nothing among the four cell cards and the eight column ends that fits onto a foundation or onto another column. Because nothing is hidden, being stuck is always the end of that deal; there is no redeal and no reshuffle.

Goal & scoring

You win by moving all 52 cards onto the foundations, each suit in order from ace up to king. FreeCell keeps no points in its traditional form. A deal is won or lost, and players who want a finer measure compare move counts or elapsed time on the same numbered deal rather than tallying a score.

The interesting number in FreeCell is how often a deal can be won at all. Because every card is visible and four cells is a generous allowance, nearly every deal has a solution: solvers put it at roughly 99.999 percent of random deals. Microsoft's original set of 32,000 numbered deals contains exactly one that has been proven impossible, deal 11,982, and establishing that took a volunteer effort running through the mid-1990s. The same generator has been run a great deal further than that. Of the first ten million deals, 130 are unsolvable; eight of them fall inside the first million — 11,982, 146,692, 186,216, 455,889, 495,505, 512,118, 517,776 and 781,948.

Losing a FreeCell deal is therefore almost always your mistake rather than the shuffle's, which is both the appeal and the cruelty of the game. Solvable does not mean easy, though. Asked which of the 32,000 is hardest without being impossible, solvers tend to name 1,941, with 10,692 the other candidate. Deal 617 is the most asked-about of the lot, which is a different thing: it is the first really awkward deal you meet playing them in order, and it is a good deal easier than 1,941. Working through the numbered deals in order is a long-running informal challenge.

Variants

Baker's Game — The game FreeCell was derived from. Identical layout and identical four free cells, but the tableau builds down in suit instead of alternating colours. Removing colour-based landing spots roughly halves the places any card can go, and winnability drops from near-certainty to somewhere around three quarters of deals, so a lost game here is much less likely to be your fault.

Eight Off — Eight free cells rather than four. Deal 48 cards into eight columns of six, then place the remaining four cards one each into four of the eight cells, leaving four cells open. The tableau builds down in suit, and only a king may be moved into an empty column. The extra cells are compensation for both of those tighter restrictions.

Seahaven Towers — Fifty cards go into ten columns of five, and the last two cards are placed into two of the four free cells, leaving two open. The tableau builds down in suit and only kings may fill an empty column. With ten short columns, two occupied cells and no colour alternation, it plays much more tightly than FreeCell and rewards planning several moves ahead.

ForeCell — Deal four cards face up into the four free cells first, then 48 cards into eight columns of six. You start with every cell full, so your first job is emptying them. The tableau builds down in alternating colours as in FreeCell, but only a king may be moved into an empty column, which removes the escape hatch that makes standard FreeCell so forgiving.

• classic
• family-friendly
• solo
• strategy

Rules checked against Wikipedia, Solitaire Laboratory, Solitaire Central, BVS Solitaire, PlayFreeCellOnline, Freecell Solver documentation (Shlomi Fish).

Gin Rummy

Also known as Gin

Players

2 players

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed

Time

20-45 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Rummy family

Setup

Gin Rummy is a two-handed game using a full 52-card pack with the jokers taken out. Pick the first dealer by drawing from the shuffled pack: low card deals. After that whoever lost the previous hand deals, though plenty of tables hand it to the winner instead, so agree which before you start.

The dealer shuffles, the opponent cuts, and ten cards go to each player one at a time, non-dealer first. Put the rest of the pack face down in the middle as the stock and turn its top card face up next to it. That upcard is the whole discard pile for now, and it leaves 31 cards in the stock.

Ranks run from ace low up to king, and they do not wrap. A-2-3 is a legal sequence; Q-K-A is not. For counting, an ace is 1 point, a numbered card is worth its number, and each jack, queen and king is 10. Keep your hand hidden. Nothing goes on the table until somebody ends the hand.

Play

There are two kinds of meld. A set is three or four cards that share a rank. A run is three or more cards of a single suit in unbroken order. Each card can only work in one meld at a time, so holding 7♣ 7♠ 7♥ 8♥ 9♥ you may count the set of sevens or the heart run, not both. Everything outside your melds is deadwood, and its point total is what the whole game turns on.

The first turn has its own procedure. The non-dealer may take the upcard or refuse it. If they refuse, the dealer gets the same offer. If both refuse, the non-dealer opens by drawing the top card of the stock. Whoever takes a card then discards, and the players alternate normally from there.

An ordinary turn is two actions with nothing in between. Draw exactly one card, either the face-down top of the stock or the face-up top of the discard pile, then discard exactly one card face up onto the pile. You are back to ten cards at the end of every turn. You may not take the top discard and throw the same card straight back on that turn; a handful of modern rule sets, the Gin Rummy Association's among them, do permit it, so settle that one before the first deal. Melds are never laid on the table during play; they stay in your hand until the hand ends.

You end the hand by knocking. You may knock on any turn, including your first, as long as your deadwood after discarding comes to 10 points or less. To do it, lay your final discard face down instead of face up, then spread your hand with the melds grouped separately from the deadwood and state your count. Knocking is optional. With a low count you are allowed to keep playing and hunt for a bigger score, at the risk of being knocked on first.

Zero deadwood is gin. Declare it the same way, spreading a hand in which every card is melded once the discard is gone.

Your opponent now spreads too. They arrange their own melds and then lay off: any loose card of theirs that fits one of your melds can be pushed onto it, adding a fourth card to a set or extending either end of a run. Every card laid off comes out of their deadwood. Two restrictions matter. Nothing can be laid off against a gin hand, and nothing can ever be laid off onto the other player's deadwood.

Once the laying off is finished the two deadwood counts are compared, which decides who scores the hand.

The stock can run out. If a player draws the card that leaves only two cards in the stock and then discards without knocking, the hand is dead: neither player scores, and the same dealer deals again. Those last two stock cards are never drawn.

Goal & scoring

Hands are only steps toward the match target, which is 100 points. Longer sessions sometimes set it at 250 or 500; nothing else about the scoring changes.

A knock that survives scores the knocker the difference between the two deadwood counts. Knock with 6 against an opponent left holding 21 and you take 15. If the opponent's count after laying off is lower than yours, or exactly equal to it, they have undercut you: they score the difference plus a 25-point undercut bonus, and an equal count still counts as an undercut, worth the flat 25. Gin scores 25 plus every point of deadwood in the opponent's hand, and it can be neither laid off against nor undercut. Those 25s are the modern figures and not the original ones: the older official values were 20 for gin, 10 for an undercut and 20 a box, and rule sets giving them are still about. Agree which you are using, since it changes what a close hand is worth.

Keep running totals. The game ends as soon as either player's total reaches 100 at the end of a hand. Then add the bonuses: each player scores 25 for every individual hand they won, called a box or line bonus, and whoever reached 100 first adds a 100-point game bonus. If the loser never won a single hand, the winner doubles their entire total, game bonus included, which is known as a shutout, blitz or schneider. The higher total after bonuses wins the match, and the gap between the totals is the margin that gets settled. A dead hand scores nothing and counts as a hand won by neither player, so it earns no box. In the rare case that the two totals finish exactly level, the match goes to whoever crossed 100 first.

Variants

Oklahoma Gin — The first upcard fixes the knock limit for the whole deal instead of the standard 10. If it is a 6, nobody may knock with more than 6 points of deadwood; face cards set the limit at 10, so an ordinary deal. Most tables add that an ace as the upcard means only gin ends the hand, and many use a spades-double rule where a spade upcard doubles everything scored that deal. This is the most widely played competitive form of the game.

Hollywood Gin — A scoring frame rather than a rules change: three games are tracked at once in three columns. The first hand a player wins is entered in their first column only, their second win goes into the first and second columns, and every win after that goes into all three. Each column is a separate race to 100 with its own bonuses, so a match runs longer and an early lead is worth much more.

Straight Gin — Knocking is abolished. The only way to end a hand is to go gin with all ten cards melded, which means no undercuts, no laying off and no partial scores. Hands run much longer and the whole discard-reading side of the game gets sharper, because you cannot bail out of a bad hand with a cheap knock.

Big Gin — An extra bonus recognised at many tables. If the card you draw gives you eleven melded cards with no discard needed, you declare big gin and score 31 plus your opponent's deadwood instead of the usual 25. Some groups score it at 25 like ordinary gin, so settle the number in advance.

Three- and four-handed gin — For three, the usual arrangement is that one player sits out each deal and the two active players use the standard rules, with the winner staying in and the loser swapping out. For four, play as two partnerships: each player faces one opponent in a separate two-handed hand, then the partners' results for that round are combined and only the net difference is entered on the score sheet.

• classic
• counting
• strategy
• travel
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, Denexa Games, Official Game Rules, Cool Old Games.

Go Fish

Also known as Fish

Players

2-6 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed

Time

10-20 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Matching & collecting

Setup

Use a standard 52-card deck with the jokers out. Suits do not matter at any point; only rank does. Two can play, but the game is at its best somewhere between three and six. The short name Fish belongs to this game, though it is also used for the much more complicated partnership game Literature, which is not this one.

Choose a dealer however you like. Deal one card at a time, clockwise.

How many cards each player gets depends on the size of the table, and the two published accounts draw the line in different places. Both deal five each once four or more are playing, and both deal seven each at two players. At three they part company: one deals seven, the other five. Say which you are using before the deal. The smaller hand keeps more cards in the middle to fish from.

Spread the undealt cards face down in a loose pile in the centre. This is the stock. Keep it spread out rather than squared up so everyone can reach it without knocking it over.

Pick your hand up and sort it by rank so you can see what you already hold. A complete book of four that you were dealt goes straight down in front of you before the first turn: a book is laid down whenever it is complete, and the end of the deal counts. Play starts with the player to the dealer's left.

Play

Turns pass clockwise. On your turn you ask one specific opponent, by name, for one specific rank. Say who you are asking and what you want: "Priya, do you have any sevens?"

Two restrictions govern the ask. Ask only for a rank you are already holding — no fishing for sevens unless a seven is sitting in your hand. And you must direct the question at a single named player, not at the table in general.

If the player you asked holds any cards of that rank, they must hand over every one of them, not just one. You add them to your hand and your turn continues: ask again, of anyone at the table, for any rank you now hold. A good run can strip several opponents in one turn.

If the player you asked has none of that rank, they say "Go fish." You draw the top card of the stock. If it happens to be the very rank you just asked for, show it to the table and take another turn. Otherwise you keep the card quietly and your turn ends, passing to the player on your left.

Whenever you complete a book, meaning all four cards of one rank, put it down in front of you straight away. The accounts differ on whether it sits face up or is shown and then turned face down; either way the table has seen it, and those cards are out of play and cannot be asked for again. Completing a book does not end your turn and does not earn you an extra one; carry on with whatever you were doing.

A hand ends as soon as either the stock is exhausted or a player is left holding no cards, and whoever has the most books at that moment wins it. That is worth reading twice, because it means emptying your hand is not itself a way of winning — it is a way of stopping the game, which is a different thing, and it can stop it while you are behind. One of the two accounts disagrees and hands the win outright to whoever sheds their last card first, so settle which version you are playing before the deal; they reward opposite play.

Both accounts also describe carrying on until every card has been made into a book, with anyone who runs dry drawing a fresh hand from the stock. That is the alternative rather than the rule, and it is in the variants below. Thirteen ranks at four cards each accounts for the whole pack, which is what gives that version a natural stopping point.

Goal & scoring

You are collecting books, and a book is four cards of the same rank. Suits are irrelevant. The player with the most books when the hand ends wins it.

The bare game needs no scoring beyond counting books, but one account gives two ways of making a session of it. Play a series of hands, score a point per book, and run to an agreed target — ten points is the figure it suggests. Or score the books by their cards, counting 2 to 10 at face value, 11 for a jack, 12 for a queen, 13 for a king and 15 for an ace, which makes the high ranks worth chasing rather than just worth counting.

Neither account says what to do if two or more players tie for the most books. Sharing the win is the obvious answer, and nothing in either of them suggests a decider.

The skill in the game is memory. Every question tells the table what you hold and what you were missing, and every handover tells them what you just gained. Track who asked for what, and go after players you know are sitting on a rank you need. There is a habit worth copying from one of the accounts: put the same rank to different opponents in turn rather than working steadily through your own hand in front of everybody, so that your questions give less of it away.

Variants

Ask for the exact card — Instead of naming a rank, you name a single card by rank and suit, such as the nine of clubs. You must still be holding a card of the named rank yourself before you may ask, and one account has you show it as you do. Successful requests become far rarer, so hands last longer and remembering exactly which cards have surfaced matters much more. Settle one point first: whether you may ask for a card you are holding yourself. You will certainly be told to go fish, which is the point — it is a pure bluff, and it costs you your turn.

The blocker plays next — When someone tells you to go fish, the turn moves to them rather than to the player on your left. Turn order becomes unpredictable, which stops players from timing their questions around a fixed rotation, and it rewards answering "go fish" honestly and fast. Both accounts carry it, one as a variation and one beside the ordinary rule, so agree on it before the deal rather than discovering it mid-hand.

Play on to all thirteen books — Keep going past the point where the ordinary game would stop, until every card has been made into a book. Run dry and you take five fresh cards off the stock, or all that is left of it if it holds fewer. Once the stock itself is gone there is nothing to fish for, so an unsuccessful ask simply ends your turn and play moves on. Hands run considerably longer and the result turns on memory rather than on when somebody happened to run dry.

Pairs instead of books — Collect pairs of matching rank rather than sets of four, laying each pair down as you make it. Twenty-six pairs in the deck instead of thirteen books means cards leave hands much faster and a hand finishes in a few minutes. One account records this as the ordinary Australian game, dealt seven cards each, with one rule worth keeping: a pair goes down the moment you make it, so you may not sit on one as a licence to ask for the other two.

Happy Families and other purpose-made decks — Dedicated illustrated packs replace ranks with themed sets. The best known is the British game Happy Families, whose 44-card pack holds eleven families of four members each. It is close to Go Fish rather than identical to it: you ask for one named card rather than a rank, a player who has not got it says "not at home", and the turn then passes to them instead of to your left. Many modern children's Go Fish decks work the same way, matching by picture rather than by rank, which lets players who cannot yet read card ranks join in.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• kids
• luck
• memory
• quick
• travel

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Geeky Hobbies, Ducksters, Solitaire Paradise.

Golf

Also known as Golf Solitaire, Golf Patience, One Foundation

Players

1 player

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards)

Time

5-15 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Solitaire (1 player)

Setup

Shuffle a full 52-card deck. Deal 35 cards face up into seven columns of five. Overlap the cards in each column so every rank stays readable, with the last card dealt to a column sitting at the exposed end. All 35 are visible from the start, so nothing is hidden. The 17 cards left over become the stock, kept face down in a single pile. Turn the top stock card face up beside it to start the waste pile, which is the one pile you will build on for the rest of the deal, leaving 16 cards in the stock. Other descriptions call that build pile the foundation, which is where the alternative name One Foundation comes from, or else the discard pile; and some treat turning the first card as the player's opening move rather than as part of the deal. Nothing hangs on that except whether you call the stock 17 or 16 at the moment play begins. Leave room for the waste to grow, since in a good deal nearly the whole pack ends up there. There are no foundations by suit and no reserve; the seven columns, the stock, and the waste are the entire layout.

Play

Only the exposed card at the open end of each column is in play. The rest are locked until the cards covering them are gone.

On your turn you may move any one exposed column card onto the waste pile, provided its rank is exactly one higher or one lower than the current top card of the waste. Suits and colours are ignored entirely. If the waste shows a 9, you may play any 8 or any 10. Moving a card exposes the one behind it in that column, which may then be playable in turn, so a single well-placed card can start a long chain.

How the two ends of the rank order behave is the thing accounts disagree about, and the difference is large enough to settle before you deal. In the strict form the ranks run A 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K and do not wrap: an ace takes only a 2, and a king is a complete dead end on which nothing whatever may be packed, not even a queen, so a king on the waste forces you to draw. From there the rule is loosened in two steps. The first lets a queen go onto a king, reopening the high end without joining it to the low one. The second, called Putt Putt, turns the corner outright: a king plays on an ace and an ace on a king, and the sequence becomes a loop with no dead end anywhere. Some accounts give the strict form as the game and the other two as ways of making it easier; others simply describe the turned corner as how Golf is played.

You may keep making legal moves for as long as you like; you are never forced to draw. Cards never move between columns, never move back off the waste, and never go onto the stock. Once a column is emptied the gap stays empty for the rest of the deal, and nothing may be placed there.

When you are stuck, or simply choose to, turn the next card of the stock face up onto the waste. That card becomes the new build card regardless of what it covers, so a draw can reset the sequence to any rank. Drawing is the only way to change the top of the waste other than playing a column card.

The deal ends when the stock is empty and no exposed column card can legally be played onto the waste. There is no redeal and no shuffling of the waste back into the stock. One exception is recognised: a tableau that can be seen from the deal to be unclearable — every queen buried under a king, say — may be gathered up, reshuffled and dealt again instead of being played out. If you have cleared all 35 column cards you have holed out; otherwise the deal is over with cards still on the table.

This patience is also played as a contest, which needs a deck each and changes none of the rules above: everyone plays the same number of holes and the lowest total wins, or the round is scored as match play, counting how many holes each player is up or down.

That is not the same thing as the separate multiplayer game also called Golf, which is a genuinely different game. That one is usually played as Six-Card Golf, where each player manages a private face-down grid, swapping and discarding to reach the lowest total over nine deals. The two share only the golf scoring metaphor; the rules here are for the patience.

Goal & scoring

The object of a single deal is to clear all 35 cards out of the seven columns and onto the waste. Cards left in the stock do not matter.

Score as in golf: count one stroke for every card still stranded in the columns when the deal ends. Clearing the tableau scores zero for the hole, and it can score less than nothing: hole out and you subtract one stroke for every card still face down in the stock, so the earlier you finish the further under you go. Not every account carries that second half of the rule.

A full round is nine deals, one per hole, with the strokes added up, and two rounds of nine make an eighteen-hole match. Par for the nine is put at 45, five strokes a hole, and a total of zero or below is the perfect round. No governing body sets either number — it is the convention the game is scored by, and some accounts give no par at all.

Variants

Putt Putt (wraparound) — Ranks wrap, so a king may be played on an ace and an ace on a king, making the sequence a continuous loop with no dead end anywhere. It is one of the common ways Golf is made easier, and some accounts give the turned corner not as a variation at all but as the ordinary rule.

Relaxed stock — Allow one redeal: gather the waste after the stock runs out, turn it over without shuffling, and use it as a fresh stock. Some house rules instead let you undo the last move or deal a shorter tableau of six columns of five, leaving 22 cards in the stock. All of these trade difficulty for a better chance of holing out.

Wild jokers — Add one joker to the pack, or both, and treat each as a wild card standing for any rank: it may be played onto whatever the waste shows, and whatever you like may be played onto it. The tableau is still seven columns of five, so every joker added simply lengthens the stock.

Free start — Turn no card to start the waste. The pile begins empty and your first move is to lift any exposed column card onto it, which lets you choose the rank you build from instead of taking whatever the stock hands you. That is the head start it is played for.

Black Hole — David Parlett's rework. Deal 17 fans of three cards around the ace of spades, which sits alone in the centre as the only foundation. Build up or down on it with wraparound, taking the exposed card of any fan, and there is no stock at all. Everything is visible from the start, so it plays as a puzzle rather than a gamble, and the great majority of deals are solvable.

All in a Row — Also by Parlett. The whole deck is dealt into 13 overlapping fans of four cards in a single row, with no stock and no starting foundation card. The first card you take becomes the base of the waste and you build up or down with wraparound from there, aiming to absorb all 52 cards.

Double Golf — Two shuffled decks, 104 cards, dealt into a wider tableau. No layout is standard across sources, so fix one before you deal: eight columns of eight uses 64 cards and leaves 40 in the stock, which keeps the ratio of tableau to stock close to the single-deck game. Everything else, including scoring one stroke per card stranded in the columns, is unchanged. Duplicated ranks give more branching options, but the larger layout means a single dead run can still leave a heavy score.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• luck
• quick
• solo
• strategy

Rules checked against Wikipedia, GameRules.com, Solitaire Central Rulebook, Solitaire Laboratory, Wikibooks Solitaire card games, Parlett Games, Bicycle Cards.

Hand and Foot

Also known as Hand & Foot, Hand and Foot Canasta

Players

2-6 players (best with 4)

Deck

One more deck than there are players, jokers included: 5 decks and their 10 jokers (270 cards) for the usual four-player game

Time

90+ minutes

Difficulty

Complex

Category

Rummy family

Setup

Hand and Foot is the North American Canasta that took over the kitchen table. It keeps Canasta's melds of seven, its wild twos and jokers and its red threes, and adds one idea of its own: you are dealt two packets of cards instead of one, and you have to work your way out of the first before you are allowed to look at the second.

Two to six can play. Four is the standard game, two partnerships sitting opposite one another; six is given as two teams of three, and at two, three or five everyone plays alone. The usual formula for the pack is one deck more than there are players, jokers left in, so four players shuffle five decks together and get 270 cards. Plenty of groups simply keep five or six decks bagged up and use them whatever the turnout.

Cut for the first deal, high card taking it, and pass the deal one seat to the left for each of the four hands; play runs clockwise throughout. Deal two packets to every player. The size is not agreed: eleven in each is one published figure, thirteen in each is another, and a third version deals eleven as the hand and thirteen as the foot. Settle it before you start. The first packet is the hand, which you pick up and sort. The second is the foot, which goes face down in front of you untouched, and stays there until the hand is gone. Many tables skip the dealing entirely and have each player cut their own two packets out of the shuffled pile, counting them afterwards to check.

What is left goes face down as the stock — with a pack this size it is normally split into two or three separate draw piles so everyone can reach one. Turn one card up to open the discard pile; if it is a red three or a wild card, bury it and turn another.

Before anyone plays, any red three in a dealt hand goes straight out beside that player's melds, and a card comes off the stock to replace it — again if the replacement is itself a red three. Red threes found later, in a foot or drawn from the stock, are handled the same way as they appear. First turn goes to whoever sits on the dealer's left.

Melds belong to the partnership rather than the player, so keep them in one group between you where both can reach. A full game is four deals with a rising entry price, and the score is cumulative.

Play

There are no sequences in this game. A meld is three to seven cards of one rank, four up to ace, and suits never matter. Jokers and twos are wild. Once a meld reaches seven cards it is a canasta and takes no more; to go on melding that rank, start a fresh pile beside it, and note that a side may not have two unfinished melds of the same rank at once.

There are three kinds, counted separately all game. A clean canasta is seven natural cards with no wild among them. A dirty canasta has wild cards in it, but never more than half as many as the naturals — which works out as at most one wild in a meld of three, four or five cards, and at most two once it reaches six or seven. And a wild canasta is seven wild cards and nothing else, which is worth more than the other two together and which your side has to complete before it may go out at all. Square a finished canasta up and mark it — a red card on top for clean, a black one for dirty, a joker or a two for wild — so both partnerships can see at a glance where each side stands.

A turn is draw, meld if you like, discard one. You draw two each turn rather than one.

Taking the pile instead. Rather than drawing, you may claim the discard pile, but you only get the top card and the six beneath it — seven cards, not the whole heap, and only what is there if the pile is shorter. The price is that you must hold two cards matching the top card's rank and put all three down as a meld straight away; the other six cards go into your hand. A three on top blocks the pile completely, which is the only thing black threes are good for. A wild card on top does not block it outright, but it can only be taken by a player holding two matching wilds — two twos for a two, two jokers for a joker — which in practice is nearly as good as a block. Taking the pile replaces your draw, and the turn still ends with a discard.

The entry price. Neither partner may put anything on the table until the side lays out melds reaching the deal's minimum in card points, all in one turn: 50 in the first deal, then 90, then 120, then 150. When you meet the minimum by taking the pile, only the top card counts toward the total; the six cards underneath are yours to keep but contribute nothing to the requirement.

Threes. A red three drawn into your hand goes face up in front of you at once and you draw a replacement. Black threes are never melded during play and cannot be melded onto; they sit in hand as dead weight until you throw one, and their only use is the turn they spend blocking the next player.

Getting into the foot. This is the pivot the whole game turns on. When your hand is finally empty you pick up the foot and go on playing from it — and how you emptied it decides when. Empty it by melding, with no card left to throw, and the foot comes up immediately and your turn continues from the new cards. Empty it by discarding your last card and the turn is over; the foot waits for you until next time. That one-turn difference is worth planning several turns ahead, because a partner stuck in their hand while you are in your foot cannot help you finish.

Going out. Three things must be true before you may end the deal. Your side must have completed its quota of canastas — two clean, two dirty and one wild, the same in every deal. Your partner must be into their foot too, with at least part of one turn played from it, so that nobody finishes while the other half of the side is still stuck in their hand. And you must clear your own cards, which usually means laying off everything except a final discard. The quota is the single most house-ruled thing in the game and accounts vary widely on it: some ask three clean and four dirty, some drop the wild canasta, and single-player games are cut right down. Until you can satisfy all three conditions you may not strip yourself bare either — playing from your foot, you have to keep at least two cards back, one to discard and one to carry on with. Before you commit, ask your partner whether you may go out, and abide by the answer — a no usually means they are holding cards that will cost the side more than your finishing is worth.

The stock running out. If the draw piles empty before anyone goes out, play stops there. Nobody gets the going-out bonus and the deal is scored as it lies, which normally hurts whichever side has the most left in hand.

Goal & scoring

A game is four deals and the highest cumulative total wins; there is no target to race to, which means a side that falls behind early has a genuine reason to keep playing, since the bonuses are large enough to swing a deal at any point.

Each deal is scored for the partnership as a whole. Add the bonuses for every canasta the side finished, add 100 if one of your players went out, add the red threes, then add the face value of every card you have melded and subtract the face value of every card still sitting in either partner's hand or unopened foot. An unplayed foot is expensive — eleven untouched cards can wipe out a canasta — which is why getting into it early matters more than melding pretty.

Red threes cut both ways. The version described here pays 100 for each one laid face up on the table and charges 100 for each one that never got there — which is what makes an unopened foot worse than it looks, since any red three still buried in it counts against you along with everything else. Beyond that the field disagrees loudly: some groups pay them only to a side that finished at least one canasta, some charge a much larger flat penalty, and a few pay a bonus for collecting all of them. Black threes are worth 5 against you and nothing at all for you.

The scoring is the reason a partnership talks. Two clean canastas and a quick exit will usually beat a table full of dirty ones, and a partner who says no to going out is normally saying they are sitting on a foot they have not opened yet.

Variants

Hand, Knee and Foot — Three packets instead of two, worked through in order, usually eleven in the hand, eleven or thirteen in the knee and thirteen in the foot. The game runs half again as long and the pack grows to match, six or seven decks being normal. Everything else is unchanged, but the penalty for never reaching your last packet becomes severe enough that partnerships plan their whole deal around opening the knee.

Pennies from Heaven — A widely played cousin in which sevens are singled out: the side must complete a canasta of sevens before it may go out, and finishing one pays a bonus far larger than an ordinary clean canasta. Some versions add a card drawn from the stock and set aside whenever a canasta is completed, which is where the name comes from. It makes low cards suddenly precious and changes what is safe to discard for the whole table.

Two, three and five players — With any count that does not split into pairs, everyone plays alone, and many groups deal larger packets — thirteen or fifteen in each of the hand and the foot — to make up for having no partner to build with. Going-out quotas are cut right down — one clean and two dirty is one published figure — because a single player cannot realistically produce the full partnership set.

House rules that actually differ — Hand and Foot has no governing body and its rule sets disagree loudly. Common points to settle first: whether melds are capped at seven cards or may keep growing, whether a canasta may be started with wilds before its naturals arrive, how many wild cards a dirty canasta may hold, whether the pile is taken as seven cards or in its entirety, whether red threes pay or penalise, and how many canastas of each colour the going-out quota demands. A table that agrees these before the first deal will avoid the argument that otherwise arrives in deal three.

The exact cut — A popular flourish at the dealing stage. Instead of being dealt to, each player cuts their own hand and foot off the shuffled stack in one grab and counts afterwards; cutting the exact number needed earns a bonus, commonly 100 points. It costs nothing and gives the deal a small ceremony, which is part of why the game spread through clubs and cruise ships the way it did.

• counting
• family-friendly
• large-group
• long-game
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards, GameRules.com, Official Game Rules, Denexa Games, World of Card Games, Gambiter.

Hearts

Also known as Black Lady, Chase the Lady, Black Widow

Players

3-6 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed; a few low cards come out for 3, 5 or 6 players

Time

30-60 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Hearts is at its best with four players, each on their own. There are no partnerships and no trump suit. Use a 52-card pack with the jokers taken out. Aces are high and twos are low in every suit.

Pick a first dealer however you like, drawing for the low card being the usual method, then pass the deal one seat to the left after every hand. The dealer shuffles and deals the entire pack out one card at a time, clockwise, beginning with the player on their left. Four players get 13 cards each and the hand runs 13 tricks.

Other numbers need the pack trimmed so the deal comes out even. For three players, remove the 2 of diamonds and deal 17 each. For five, remove the 2 of diamonds and the 2 of clubs and deal 10 each. For six, remove the 2 and 3 of diamonds and the 2 and 3 of clubs and deal 8 each. The cards pulled are always low clubs and diamonds, the two suits that carry no penalties, so all 26 penalty points are still in the deal whatever the player count. Other combinations of low cards are used at some tables; the only things that matter are that the deal comes out even and that no heart and not the queen of spades is withdrawn.

There is no layout, no stock and no discard pile. Everything sits in the players' hands, and there is nothing to write down until the first hand has been played out.

Play

Every hand opens with a pass. Pick three cards out of your hand and lay them face down in front of the player who is to receive them. Nobody may look at the cards coming their way until they have committed their own three, so the exchange is genuinely blind on both sides. The direction rotates deal by deal: pass to the left on the first hand, to the right on the second, straight across on the third, and on the fourth hand nobody passes at all and you play what you were dealt. Then the cycle starts again. Three and five players have nobody sitting directly opposite, so their rotation drops the across pass and runs left, right, hold; six players use the full four-hand cycle.

Once everyone has picked up what came their way, the 2 of clubs opens: whoever was dealt it has to lead it. If the 2 of clubs was removed for the player count, the lowest club still in the pack leads instead: the 3 of clubs in a five-handed game, the 4 of clubs in a six-handed game. Play then goes clockwise, one card from each player.

You must follow the suit led if you hold anything in it. Only when you are void may you play something else, and then you may play any card you like subject to the two restrictions below. Nothing is trump, so a trick goes to whoever played the highest card in whatever suit was led. A card thrown off-suit cannot win the trick no matter how high it is. The winner gathers the trick face down and leads to the next one.

Two restrictions shape the whole hand.

First trick. No penalty card may be thrown on the opening trick. That rules out every heart and the queen of spades, even if you are void in clubs and would love to be rid of them. The only escape is a hand that contains literally nothing else, which almost never happens. Some groups relax this to bar hearts only and allow the queen on the first trick, so settle it before you deal.

Leading hearts. You may not lead a heart until hearts have been broken, and they are broken the first time somebody discards a heart on a trick led in another suit. The one exception is a player whose remaining cards are all hearts; they may lead one. The queen of spades is under no such restriction. She can be played whenever spades are led and discarded whenever you are void, and in the standard game putting her down does not break hearts. A good number of tables play that she does break them, which is worth agreeing on in advance.

A hand ends when all the cards are gone. Everyone turns their tricks face up, counts the penalty cards inside them, and the results go on the score sheet before the next player deals.

Goal & scoring

Hearts is a game you are trying to lose. The winner is whoever holds the fewest penalty points when the game ends.

The queen of spades costs whoever collects her 13; every heart taken in a trick costs 1. Exactly 26 points are handed out every deal. Nothing else scores at all. The number of tricks you win is irrelevant; only what is inside them matters.

The exception is shooting the moon. If a single player takes all 13 hearts and the queen of spades in the same hand, the result inverts: the shooter chooses between having 26 taken off their own total and having 26 added to every opponent's. Taking it off your own is the better option when the opponents are already close to the finish or when you are sitting on zero and cannot go below it. The attempt is all or nothing. Let one heart escape to another player and you simply keep the pile you have gathered, which is normally a catastrophe.

Keep a running total for each player. The game ends at the end of the hand in which anyone reaches or passes 100 points, and the player with the lowest total at that moment wins. A target of 50 makes for a quicker game. If two or more players are level on the lowest total when the game would end, nobody has won: deal again and keep playing complete hands, with the same finish condition applied each time, until exactly one player is alone on the lowest score.

Variants

Omnibus Hearts (Jack of Diamonds) — The jack of diamonds becomes a bonus card worth minus 10, so whoever takes it in a trick has 10 points struck off their score for that hand. It reshapes the deal completely, because diamonds are suddenly worth fighting for rather than dumping, and a shot at the moon now requires the jack as well as all the hearts and the queen of spades. Some groups use the 10 of diamonds for the same purpose.

Black Maria — The British three-handed form. Take out the 2 of clubs so that each of three players receives 17 cards. Three spades carry penalties instead of one: the queen is worth 13, the king 10 and the ace 7. Cards are passed three to the right only, there is no fixed opening lead, and many groups play it without any moon-shooting rule, so the hand is purely about dodging the black suit.

Cancellation Hearts — Built for six or more players using two full packs shuffled together. Identical cards cancel each other: if the same rank and suit appears twice in one trick, neither copy can win it, and the trick goes to the highest surviving card of the suit led. If every candidate cancels out, nobody wins the trick; it stays on the table and is swept up along with all its penalty cards by whoever takes the next one.

Spot Hearts — Hearts are worth their pip value rather than a flat point each. The 2 through 10 count face value, the jack, queen and king count 10 apiece, the ace counts 15, and the queen of spades is raised to 25. That makes a single deal worth 124 points instead of 26, so the game target has to be scaled up to match, commonly to 500. Low hearts become throwaways and the ace of hearts becomes the card everyone is watching.

Shoot the Sun — An extra tier above shooting the moon that almost nobody achieves. Taking every trick in the hand, not merely every penalty card, is worth double the usual moon: 52 points against each opponent, or 52 struck off your own total, whichever you prefer. Groups that use it treat a failed sun as an ordinary moon attempt, so a player who wins twelve tricks and all the penalties still scores the plain moon. Doubling is not universal; plenty of tables recognise the feat but pay it at the ordinary 26, so say which you are using before anyone tries it.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• counting
• family-friendly
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, Official Game Rules, Dice Game Depot, Trickster Cards, Cool Old Games.

Indian Rummy

Also known as Paplu, 13 Card Rummy

Players

2-10 players (best with 4)

Deck

2 standard decks with one printed joker each (106 cards); a third deck once there are more than six players

Time

30-60 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Rummy family

Setup

This is the rummy of Indian trains, clubs and afternoon kitty parties — thirteen cards, two decks, and one requirement that separates it from every other member of the family. It also answers to Paplu, and small stakes are the norm at the table rather than the exception.

Two decks and their printed jokers, 106 cards, will cover a table of up to six. Seven players or more want a third deck shuffled in, making 159. Ten is about as many as can sit round a table and still reach it.

The wild cards are appointed fresh every hand and this is the first thing to settle. One card is pulled blind from the shuffled pack and turned face up, and its rank goes wild for the hand — every card of that rank, in any suit and from either deck, along with both printed jokers. So if a nine comes up, all eight nines are wild and so are the two jokers, which makes ten cards in the pack that can be anything at all. The exception is when the card turned happens to be a printed joker: then the whole hand has exactly one wild card in it, that joker's twin, and it plays very differently.

Deal thirteen cards to each player, singly. Turn one more face up to start the discard pile. What is left becomes the stock, and it does not go down flat — lay it face down at right angles across the turned-up card, so the rank that is wild stays readable to everybody for the rest of the hand and nobody has to trust their memory.

One piece of orientation before the first turn: both the deal and the play run anti-clockwise. The deal passes to the right, and the player on the dealer's right goes first. Nearly everything else in this collection goes the other way, so it is worth saying out loud at the table.

Seats and the first deal are drawn for rather than argued over. Everybody takes a card; the highest picks their seat, the next highest sits to their right, and so on down; the lowest ends up on the highest's left and deals first.

Play

Turns are the ordinary rummy pair of actions and nothing more. Take one card, either the top of the face-down stock or the top of the discard pile, and then put one card from your hand face up on the discard pile. Take from the discards and you may not throw that same card away again in the same turn; something else has to go.

What is unusual is that nothing is ever laid on the table. No melds are put down as you go, no cards are added to anyone else's combinations, and your thirteen stay in your hand until the moment you win. Everything you learn about the other players comes from what they pick up and what they throw.

The combinations are these:

• A run: three consecutive cards of one suit, or more than three. An ace can anchor either end, giving A-2-3 at the bottom and Q-K-A at the top, but it will not do both jobs in the same run — K-A-2 is nothing.
• A set: one rank, three cards, all in different suits. With two decks on the table, two identical cards make no set between them; the suits have to differ.

No card can do two jobs. A holding of 7-8-9 in diamonds alongside two more nines is a run with two spare cards or a set with two spare cards, whichever you prefer, and never both.

Wild cards stand in for whatever is missing. If the turned card was an eight, then any eight, along with either printed joker, can be a card it is not.

Which brings us to the distinction the whole game is built on. A run is straight — pure — when no wild card is doing duty as something else in it. The test is not whether a wild card is present but what it is being asked to do: with eights wild, the run 7-8-9 in one suit is straight, because that eight is simply an eight, while J-Q-8 is a run only in the ordinary sense, since the eight is pretending to be a king.

Declaring requires two runs among your thirteen cards, no fewer, with a straight one among them. The rest of your hand has to be in valid combinations too — runs or sets, wild cards welcome. Those two runs have names, and the names are the point: the straight one is your original life and the other is the second life. Until the original life exists, nothing else you are holding is alive either. The usual winning shape is four combinations of four, three, three and three, though three will do just as well — five, four and four, or five, five and three.

Winning is declared, not built up to. Having drawn, you discard your fourteenth card, say "Rummy" and lay all thirteen out for inspection.

If the stock runs out and the turn in which the last card was taken ends with nobody having declared, the hand is void and nobody wins anything.

Packing. A hand going nowhere can be abandoned — packing, or dropping. There is only one moment for it, your own turn, and you do it instead of drawing rather than as well as. Do it on your very first turn, before you have drawn anything at all, and it costs 10 points; your cards are shuffled back under the stock and may come round again. Do it later and it costs 40, and your cards are set aside out of the game for good. If everyone but one player packs, that player wins on the spot and collects.

Goal & scoring

Nobody accumulates points in this game. The winner scores nothing and everyone else pays, so the whole score sheet is a record of other people's failures.

When somebody declares, every player who did not pack works out what their own hand is worth. Aces and the court cards and the tens are 10 apiece; everything from the nine down is worth its face value; and wild cards, printed or appointed, are worth nothing.

How much of your hand you have to count depends entirely on how far you got, and this is where the two lives earn their name:

• No original life. Count every card. This is why a hand with no straight run in it is worth abandoning early — you are exposed to the full value of thirteen cards.
• An original life and nothing more. The cards in that straight run come out of the count. Everything else is charged for, sets included.
• Both lives. Now every valid combination in your hand is free — the two runs, any further runs, any sets — and you pay only for what is genuinely loose.

So the difference between one life and two is not a few points; it is usually most of the hand. A player holding a heart run, a spade run needing one card, and a completed set of fours can be paying for eleven cards or for two, depending on a single card in the middle.

Packers pay their 10 or their 40 regardless. Nobody pays anything if the stock ran out and the hand was void.

Two rarities are worth knowing before they happen to you. A player who declares immediately after their very first draw collects only half from anybody who has not yet had a turn — they never had a chance to pack. And a player dealt thirteen cards that are already a complete valid hand may announce Hand-Rummy at their first turn instead of drawing: anyone who has already played a turn then pays double, packers still pay their 10, and anyone yet to play pays the ordinary rate.

One hand is a complete game and settles itself. For a session, the common arrangements are to fix the money value of a point and settle after every deal, to agree a number of deals and total up at the end, or to play a pool in which anybody whose running total passes 101 or 201 is out and the last player standing wins. Two conventions travel with the written formats: a hand is rounded to the nearest five, so 62 goes down as 60, and it is capped at 80, so 91 goes down as 80 too.

Variants

Tanala — Where three decks are in use, three genuinely identical cards — same rank and same suit, from different packs — form a combination of their own, the tanala, and it is treated as the equal of a straight run. It is the one place in the game where duplicate suits are a virtue rather than a mistake, and since a tanala can serve as your original life, holding one turns a hand that looked dead into a live one. Not available in the two-deck game, where identical cards are simply two copies.

Paplu, the bonus wild card — As well as making every card of the turned-up rank wild, some tables promote the next card up in that same suit to a special wild card called the Paplu. It works like any other wild, but whoever ends the hand holding one collects a bonus from each opponent — 10 points is the usual figure, rising to 25 for holding two. It rewards keeping a specific card that you might otherwise have played away, which is a small and pleasant tension to add to a hand you are already trying to close.

Points, Deals and Pool — The three ways a session gets organised, and the difference is only in how long you are committed for. Points fixes a cash value per point and settles after every single deal, which is the quickest and the easiest to join late. Deals fixes a number of hands — two or three is usual — and the lowest total at the end wins. Pool sets a ceiling of 101 or 201, knocks out anybody whose running total reaches it, and runs until one player is left; it is much the longest of the three and the only one where a bad early hand really matters.

Only one run required — Drop the second life and require just one straight run to validate the hand, with everything else free to be sets or ordinary runs. It makes hands close markedly faster and takes a good deal of the sting out of the scoring, since the gap between one life and two is what turns a middling hand into an expensive one. Reasonable for teaching the game, and worth being explicit about, because a player who learned it this way and a player who did not will disagree about a declaration rather than about a rule.

• classic
• counting
• large-group
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, GameRules.com.

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.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• kids
• luck
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Geeky Hobbies, Dice Game Depot, Official Game Rules, Denexa Games.

Klondike

Also known as Solitaire, Patience, Klondike Solitaire

Players

1 player

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed

Time

5-20 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Solitaire (1 player)

Setup

Use a single 52-card deck with the jokers removed. Shuffle, then build seven tableau piles from left to right: one card in the first pile, two in the second, on up to seven in the seventh, for 28 cards in total. The tidy way to deal it is one card to each pile in a left-to-right sweep, skipping any pile that already holds its full count. Turn the exposed card of every pile face up and leave everything under it face down.

Above the tableau, reserve four spaces for the foundations. They start empty. The 24 cards you did not deal go face down in a single packet as the stock, with an empty space beside it for the waste. There is no dealer to choose and no opponent, so play begins the moment the layout is built.

One caution before you follow rules printed elsewhere: older British sources sometimes call this game Canfield, while North American sources use Canfield for an entirely different game, the one also known as Demon. Match the layout described above rather than the title on the page.

Play

There are two places to build. The four foundations go up in suit starting from the ace: an ace may go up the moment it is exposed, then the 2 of that suit, and so on through the king. The seven tableau piles go down in alternating colours, so a red 9 accepts a black 8, and that black 8 accepts a red 7.

Playable cards are the exposed card at the outer end of each tableau pile and the top card of the waste. You may move one of those to a foundation, or to a tableau pile whose exposed card is one rank higher and the opposite colour. You may also lift a run of face-up tableau cards that already descends one rank at a time in alternating colours and move it as a unit onto a card that continues that sequence. Rule sets differ over whether you may take just the lower portion of a run or must move the whole face-up group or nothing.

Any time a move leaves a face-down card at the end of a tableau pile, turn it up immediately.

Empty columns carry the one real restriction: only a king, or a run headed by a king, may be moved into a column you have cleared. Nothing else may go there, so emptying a column with no king in sight usually wastes the space.

Nothing is compulsory. You may leave an exposed ace sitting in the tableau, decline to fill an empty column, or go to the stock while tableau moves are still available; the only forced action is turning up a newly exposed face-down card.

When the tableau has nothing you want, work the stock. Turn cards face up onto the waste and play from there. Only the top card of the waste is ever playable, and it leaves one card at a time. How many cards you turn per go is the setting that defines the two common versions.

Draw one: turn a single card at a time. Every card in the stock reaches the top of the waste on every pass, so nothing stays out of reach and the game is far more forgiving.

Draw three: turn three at once, overlapped so you can read all three but only the outermost is playable. The two behind it become available only after the card in front of them is played. Because the stock is consumed in blocks of three, roughly two thirds of it is unreachable at any given moment, and every card you take shifts which cards surface on the next pass. If fewer than three cards are left when you reach the end of the stock, turn up however many remain and treat the outermost of them as the playable one. This is the older of the two and the harder, though plenty of rule books present the single card as the ordinary way to play.

When the stock runs out, turn the waste over without shuffling to form a new stock. That is a redeal, and its limit is the other point players argue about. Casual play generally allows unlimited redeals in both draw modes. Scored versions restrict it in two different ways. Standard scoring keeps redeals unlimited but bills you for each one past the first pass. Vegas scoring caps the passes outright: one pass and no redeal at draw one, three passes and two redeals at draw three. Timed and competitive settings commonly borrow the three-pass cap for draw three. None of this is standardised, so settle the limit before you deal.

Taking the top card back off a foundation into the tableau is sometimes the only way to free a card you need, but the older rules do not allow it at all and later ones split over it; where it is allowed, scored versions charge you for it. Settle it before you deal.

The deal ends when all four foundations are complete, or when you are stuck: the stock empty with no redeal left, nothing playable off the waste, and no legal move anywhere in the tableau. There is no partial win and no reshuffle. If you lose, gather the cards, shuffle properly, and deal again.

Goal & scoring

You win by getting all 52 cards onto the foundations, each suit built ace through king. Most people simply play win or lose and keep no score.

Standard scoring, the system most software uses, awards 5 points for moving a card from the waste to the tableau, 10 for moving a card to a foundation, and 5 for turning up a face-down tableau card. Pulling a card back from a foundation costs 15. Recycling the stock costs points once you are past the first pass: 20 per recycle at draw three and 100 per recycle at draw one, where a fresh pass is worth far more. The running total is not allowed to fall below zero. Timed play adds a clock to that: you shed 2 points for every 10 seconds at the table and collect a finishing bonus that shrinks the longer you took, so a fast win scores far above a slow one.

Vegas scoring treats the deal as a wager. You buy the deck for 52 units, one per card, and collect 5 units for every card you land on a foundation, so eleven cards puts you 3 ahead and break-even is closer than it looks. Passes through the stock are capped rather than penalised: one at draw one, three at draw three. Many players carry a running bankroll from deal to deal instead of settling each deal on its own.

Klondike is not always winnable, which matters more than beginners expect. Solver studies of draw-three Klondike with every face-down card revealed in advance put the ceiling near 82 percent of deals, so something close to one deal in five cannot be won by anyone regardless of skill. Draw one is more forgiving and its ceiling is higher, but there is no equally well-established published figure for it, so treat any specific draw-one percentage you see with suspicion. Playing blind, as you actually do, real results are lower, but by how much is not well pinned down: one experiment credited a strong player with 43 percent at draw three, while an older rule book put the chance at 1 in 30 when the stock is run through only once. Treat any headline percentage as describing its own sample rather than the game.

Variants

Vegas Klondike — Klondike played as a bet. You pay 52 units for the deck, one per card, and earn 5 units for each card you get onto a foundation, so eleven cards is break-even plus a little; the casino game the scheme copies is usually described at 50 rather than 52. Passes through the stock are strictly limited: one pass and no redeal at draw one, three passes at draw three. Losing money on a deal is the normal outcome, and many players keep a cumulative bankroll across a session instead of settling each deal separately.

Thoughtful Klondike — Identical to ordinary Klondike except that the identity of every face-down card is known from the start. It is mostly a research construct: because the only difference is information, any deal you could win at ordinary Klondike you could also win while seeing everything — so the Thoughtful rate can never be the lower of the two, and stands as an upper bound on the real game. The converse does not follow: plenty of deals go through only if you already know where the cards are. This is where the roughly 82 percent figure for draw three comes from; the same technique is what any credible winnability claim for Klondike rests on.

Double Klondike — Two decks, 104 cards, nine tableau piles dealt one through nine, and eight foundations, two per suit. Building rules are unchanged: foundations up in suit from the ace, tableau down in alternating colours, kings only into empty columns. The extra piles make it noticeably easier to win than single-deck Klondike. The name is also used for a two-player race in which each player has their own tableau but both feed a shared set of foundations.

Whitehead — The same 28-card, seven-pile layout as Klondike, but everything is dealt face up so there is nothing hidden. The tableau builds down in matching colour rather than alternating colour, red on red and black on black. Only runs that are entirely of one suit may be moved as a block, and an empty column will take any card or run, not just a king.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• luck
• solo
• strategy

Rules checked against Wikipedia, Solitaire Laboratory, GameRules.com, Solitaired, Solitaire.com, BVS Solitaire, Solvitaire winnability study (Blake and Gent).

Koi-Koi

Also known as Koi Koi, Hanafuda Koi-Koi

Players

2 players

Deck

1 hanafuda pack (48 flower cards, four to each of the twelve months)

Time

20-40 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Matching & collecting

Setup

Koi-Koi is played with hanafuda, and there is no substituting a Western pack: the cards have no ranks and no numbers on them, only pictures, and the whole game turns on which of four picture types a card is. Buy the pack or you cannot play. Hanafuda cards are small, thick and stiff, and they are meant to be snapped down flat rather than fanned.

The pack holds forty-eight cards in twelve months, four to a month, and the month is the only thing that makes two cards match. January is pine, February plum, March cherry, April wisteria, May iris, June peony, July bush clover, August pampas grass, September chrysanthemum, October maple, November willow and December paulownia.

Cutting across the months are the four card types, and these are what score. Five cards are brights, the large ceremonial pictures: the crane, the cherry-blossom curtain, the full moon, the rain man under his umbrella in the willow month, and the phoenix. Nine are animals — the group's name rather than a description of it, since the iris month's plank bridge and the chrysanthemum's sake cup are counted among them and neither is an animal at all; the rest are the bush warbler, the cuckoo, the butterflies, the boar, the deer, the geese and the swallow. Ten are ribbons: three red ones carry writing on them, three are blue, and the remaining four are plain red. Everything left over, twenty-four cards, is plains — worth nothing individually and quite capable of winning you the round in bulk.

Pick a first dealer any way you like; the traditional method is that each player draws a card and the earlier month deals, a tie inside one month going to the higher-value card. The dealer gives eight cards to each player and lays eight face up in the middle to form the field, dealing in packets of four — or of two — rather than singly, and the remaining twenty-four go face down as the draw pile. The dealer then takes the first turn — which, since the winner of a round normally deals the next, is a small compounding advantage and the reason winning early rounds is worth more than the raw score suggests.

If all four cards of one month land in the field, nobody can ever match them, since no player and no draw can produce a fifth. The deal is scrapped: throw the cards in, shuffle and start again. A field holding four separate pairs is treated the same way. Some tables keep a four-of-a-month field instead and let the dealer sweep the four and replace them, or hand the dealer the round outright. Three of a month in the field is fine and is in fact a prize, because the player who produces the fourth takes all four.

One consequence of those numbers is worth noticing before you start: the draw pile is never used up. Eight cards each means eight turns each and sixteen draws in all, so eight cards are still face down when the round ends. A round is bounded by the hands, not by the pile.

Play

A turn comes in two halves, and both halves are the same simple matching.

First, lay one card from your hand face up. Playing a card is compulsory — if nothing in your hand matches anything in the field you must still put one out, and choosing which one to give away is a real decision. Whether holding a match obliges you to use it is not agreed: one account says outright that it does not, and that you may put down a dead card while keeping a matching one back, where the other's wording reads as though you must match when you can. Settle it before you start. What is not in doubt is that a card laid onto its own month takes the capture — you cannot play the match and then decline it. If the field holds a card of the same month, take both and add them to your captures. If the field holds nothing of that month, your card stays in the field and is now available to your opponent.

Second, turn the top card of the draw pile face up. It behaves identically: a month match takes both cards, no match leaves it lying in the field. The drawn card can match the card you have just played out, in which case you capture the pair you have only this second created.

Where three cards of one month are already sitting in the field, the fourth takes all four at once, whether you play it from hand or turn it off the draw pile — the biggest single match the rules allow.

A single turn therefore takes nothing, two cards or four in each half, and on a rare turn where both halves land on a three-card month it can take eight. Where a month offers two possible matches you choose which card to take, and choosing well is where most of the ordinary decisions in the game are — the field is public, so you can see what your opponent needs almost as clearly as they can. Captures are laid out face up in front of you and grouped by type, never hidden.

THE DECISION

After the draw, check what you have captured. If your captures now complete a scoring combination — a yaku — that you did not have when the turn began, or extend one you already had, play stops and you must choose one of two things.

• Stop, which is called shōbu. The round ends immediately. You score everything your captures are worth and your opponent scores nothing at all.
• Call koi-koi and carry on. Nothing is banked. Play resumes, and you may only stop later if you have improved on what you already had.

Koi-koi means roughly "come on, come on", and it is a bet made against yourself. It is the only real decision in the game and the reason the game has a name. Calling raises what you might take, but it also opens a door for your opponent: complete a yaku before you complete another and they will simply stop, taking the round while you take nothing, and your call will have made their score bigger.

When you stop, or when your opponent stops after your call, the round is over even if both players still hold cards.

RUNNING OUT

If both hands empty with nobody having stopped, the round is dead. Neither player scores for their captures, however good they look on the table — a player who called koi-koi and never improved on it loses the lot — and the same dealer gathers the cards and deals again. Whether the dealer is paid for the wasted round is not agreed: one account makes it the rule, calls it the dealer's privilege, oya-ken, and puts it at a point; the other files it as a house rule and gives the usual payment as either one point or six. Say which you are using before the first deal.

A full game is twelve rounds, one per month of the hanafuda year. Six and three are both common when time is short, and some play to a target instead — first to fifty points. It is worth agreeing the length before the first deal, since it changes how recklessly you should be calling koi-koi late on. The winner of a round deals the next one.

Goal & scoring

Each round goes entirely to the player who stops with a yaku; there is no splitting and no consolation. Add the rounds up and the higher total wins the game.

Everything you have captured counts at once, so a set of captures can satisfy several yaku together. The sake cup shows this off: it is an animal, it forms both viewing combinations, and it counts as a plain as well towards the ten-plain total — four yaku out of one card.

The brights never stack. You score the single best bright combination you hold and not the lesser ones underneath it, and the rain man of the willow month is the awkward card there, because it blocks the top-scoring versions while still rescuing a hand that would otherwise be one bright short.

How far that grading reaches is where the two accounts part company, and it moves scores a long way. On one, the ribbons and the animals work like the brights — best in each group only — so the red poetry ribbons and the blue ones make a single combination worth ten rather than two worth five apiece, neither pays again inside the five-ribbon total, and the named combination instead grows by a point for each extra card of its type. On the other, and in older descriptions generally, they stack: red and blue score separately and all six still count towards the five-ribbon total on top. The table below gives the stacking form. Agree which you are playing before the first round.

The three counting yaku — animals, ribbons and plains — pay at their threshold and then a further point for each card past it, so they keep growing for as long as the round runs. This is what makes koi-koi tempting: a player already holding five animals gains a point for every additional animal captured, without needing anything new to appear.

Once your total is settled, two multipliers apply. A total of seven or more is doubled, which is why the difference between six points and seven is worth more than one point; that one was a house rule first and was only later taken into the game proper, and a few tables still leave it out. The other belongs to the koi-koi call, and here both accounts agree: if your opponent called koi-koi at any point in the round and you are the one who stops, your score is doubled. The punishment for a greedy call is severe, and how many times they called makes no difference. Tables vary: some give the doubling to the caller rather than to their opponent, some to whoever stops if anybody called at all, and some scale it with the calls, the multiplier being one more than the number made. The two multipliers compound rather than replace each other, so a nine-point hand taken against a caller is worth thirty-six. Fix which you are using before the first round; on a big hand it decides the game.

The game is also played for a stake per point rather than a running total. One account describes the zero-sum form built for that, where whatever the winner scores comes off the loser.

Variants

Sake cup rulings — The chrysanthemum sake cup earns its reputation: as standard it is an animal, it counts as a plain as well for the ten-plain total, and it forms both viewing yaku with the moon and the cherry curtain, so one card feeds four combinations. The house rules recorded for it cut it back rather than extend it. One is to drop the two viewing yaku altogether, since a five-point pair of cards makes early rounds swing hard — many video-game versions offer that as a switch — or to allow them only to a player who already holds some other yaku. Others restrict the card itself: let it count as an animal or as a plain but not both, or as an animal only. There is also a weather ruling, under which willow cards in the field rain off the blossom viewing and paulownia cards fog out the moon viewing until they have been cleared away.

Lucky hands — The two lucky hands, or teyaku, are standard rather than optional, and there are only these two. Teshi is all four cards of one month in your hand; kuttsuki is four separate pairs. Either is declared at once and takes the round for a flat six points, with the claimant dealing next; if both players have one the round is a draw and the same dealer deals again. Accounts differ on a player holding both hands at once — six points on some, twelve on others — so settle that in advance. The reasoning behind paying for them at all is that these hands are miserable for capturing: the six points are there to make up for a bad deal rather than to reward a good one. Some tables take that further and treat both hands as a misdeal instead, exactly as they would if the combination had been dealt to the field.

Multiplier conventions — Some tables drop the doubling at seven points, so a big hand pays only what it is worth on the card — that multiplier began as a house rule anyway. The koi-koi doubling is redirected as readily as it is dropped: to the caller instead of their opponent, or to whoever stops if anybody called at all. It can also be made to scale with the calls, the multiplier running one higher than the number made, so a second call pays three times and a third four. A different lever again is the opening field: borrowing from Hachi-Hachi, some tables double the round's score when a bright turns up among the eight, and raise the multiplier once more for every further bright. These choices decide whether one bold round can win the game, so they are worth more thought than any single yaku value.

Round count and the dealer — Twelve rounds, one for each month, is the standard length; six and three are both common, and playing to a target of fifty points instead is a third option. Who deals after a drawn round varies: the same dealer deals again as standard, sometimes taking a point or six for the privilege, but the deal may instead pass to the other player, or the round may be awarded to whoever last formed or improved a yaku. Longer games favour steady small yaku; a three-round game rewards calling koi-koi much harder.

• classic
• luck
• memory
• strategy
• travel
• two-player

Rules checked against Wikipedia, Fuda Wiki, Board Game Arena game help, Sloperama hanafuda rules, Gambiter, Hanafuda Legends, GameDesign.jp.

Mau-Mau

Also known as Mau Mau, Tschau Sepp, Auflegen

Players

2-8 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck stripped to 32 cards (A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7 in each suit); a full 52-card pack works too, and two packs suit six or more players

Time

15-30 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Shedding

Setup

The usual pack is the German 32: take a standard deck and remove everything below the seven, leaving ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine, eight and seven in each suit. A full 52-card pack is perfectly playable and simply makes the hands longer. From six players upwards, shuffle two packs together and play them as a single deck of 64. Having a card twice over changes nothing here, because no card in this game is ever measured against another; it is only ever laid beside the one showing to see whether they agree.

Rank order does nothing during play. No card outranks any other. A rank is worth knowing for two reasons only: a handful of ranks carry a special power, and every rank has a point value that is charged against whoever is still holding it when the hand ends.

Deal five cards to each player, one at a time, clockwise. Six is also common and makes for a slower, more tactical hand. The undealt cards become the stock, face down in the middle, and the top one is turned up beside it as the first card of the discard pile. Whatever lands there has no power: a seven, an eight, a nine or an ace opening the pile is simply a suit and a rank for the first player to match. A jack needs a decision of its own, its only job being to name a suit — some tables have the dealer name one, others take it from the card at the bottom of the stock.

Pick the first dealer any way you like. The player to the dealer's left goes first, play runs clockwise, and the deal moves one seat left after each hand.

Play

A turn is one card, laid face up on the discard pile. What you lay has to share either a suit or a rank with the card already showing: a club covers a club, and a nine covers a nine, and either match is as good as the other. Nothing more is asked of an ordinary card. Nor are you obliged to play one: a player who could lay a card but would rather not may go to the stock instead, and may decline the card they draw as well. Some tables tighten that up and make you play whenever you can, so it is worth saying which way you play.

Jacks are the wild card. A jack goes on top of anything at all, and as you play it you name a suit out loud; the next player must follow the suit you named, and that suit holds until somebody legally replaces it. The suit you call need not be one you hold anything in, and calling the jack's own suit is allowed. That includes a jack already showing, though some tables bar jack on jack so a named suit has to be answered properly.

The other cards that may carry a power:

• Seven: the next player picks up two cards. Whether they lose the turn as well is not agreed — some accounts have them draw and then play on regardless. If that player has a seven of their own they may lay it instead of drawing, in which case the debt moves along with two more added to it, and the sevens can stack around the table until somebody runs out of them.
• Eight: the next player is skipped.
• Ace: no two accounts agree. Some have the player lay a second card along with it, some have the next player miss a turn, and some give it no power whatever. Agree on one before you start.
• Nine: where it is used at all, it reverses the direction of play, which in a two-handed game amounts to another skip.

Stop and agree the list before the first deal. Every family has its own, and half the arguments this game generates come from someone assuming the eight does what it did at their grandmother's table.

With no legal card in hand you take one from the stock. A drawn card that fits may go straight down; a drawn card that does not fit stays in your hand and the turn moves on. Some tables have you keep drawing until something playable turns up, which keeps hands moving but swells them alarmingly. When the stock is empty, lift the top card of the discard pile, shuffle everything under it and set it down as a fresh stock. If there is nothing underneath to shuffle, because every other card is in somebody's hand, the stock stays empty: a player with nothing to lay simply passes, and if the turn goes right round with nobody able to play, the hand is blocked and ends with no winner, each player counting what they hold if you are keeping score.

The announcements are what give the game its name. The word "Mau" goes with your second-to-last card, spoken as it lands. "Mau-Mau" is the less settled of the two: many tables keep it for going out on a jack and want nothing said over an ordinary last card, while others call it on whatever the last card turns out to be. Forget either one and any opponent may call you on it before the next card is played, at which point you draw a penalty of two cards and, if you had been going out, carry on playing. Some tables charge a single card instead. Going out on a jack is provided for rather than barred — it is what the second announcement is for, and where a score is kept it can be worth double. Some sets do refuse a finish on an ace, and some refuse one on any card carrying a power at all, on the ground that an effect aimed at nobody is a poor way to end a hand.

Goal & scoring

A hand is won by the first player to empty their hand. Many families stop there, deal again, and never write anything down; the game is short enough that keeping score is optional.

Where a score is kept it is generated by the cards the losers are still holding, and the jack, the most useful card in the pack, is also much the most expensive one to be caught with. Two conventions are in circulation and they run in opposite directions. Under the first, the winner takes the combined total of everyone else's leftovers and the session belongs to the first player past an agreed figure, 150 being the one that gets printed. Under the second, every player books their own leftovers against themselves, the game stops the moment anyone passes the figure, and whoever has fewest points then has won. Neither scheme alters what a card is worth. All that changes is who ends up owning the number.

Values are not standardised, and the table gives one set in circulation. A flatter one also goes about: jacks 20, aces, kings and queens 10 apiece, and everything else at face value. It is easier to remember and levels the court cards out.

Once somebody crosses the line, play the deal in progress out to its end rather than stopping mid-hand. Should two players be past the figure when it finishes, the winner is whichever of them has more points if the winner has been collecting them, and whichever has fewer if players have been counting against themselves. If those two are exactly level, one more deal settles it.

Variants

Neuner — The Austrian and Bavarian form, whose name simply means "nines". A joker joins the 32-card pack and the nines are the wild cards that let you call a suit. Everything else runs much as usual, but moving that job onto a rank which otherwise has none, and adding a joker on top of it, changes the feel of a hand considerably: there is more wild in the deck than most players are used to.

Tschau Sepp — The Swiss version, played with a 36-card pack and on record since the early 1960s. Its name is its call: where a German table shouts "Mau-Mau" on going out, a Swiss one shouts "Tschau Sepp". Counting up the points left in the losers' hands, which many German tables never bother with, is particularly associated with the Swiss game.

Sevens that do not stack — A live disagreement, and one to settle before the cards go out. In the strict version a seven is simply a two-card penalty, and holding a seven of your own does not save you: you draw and the game moves on. Hands stay smaller and the seven becomes a card you play for tempo rather than a weapon to be saved. In the stacking version a run of three or four sevens can hand somebody six or eight cards at once and effectively end their chances for the deal.

The house-rule layer — The reason no two tables play the same game. Extra ranks pick up powers: a queen may reverse direction, a ten may let you play a second card, a specific card may force everyone but you to draw. Some groups let a card be laid out of turn if it exactly matches the rank showing, which turns the game into a scramble. None of it touches the underlying matching rule, and all of it should be settled before the cards go out rather than argued over mid-hand.

Draw until you can play — Instead of taking one card and passing, a stuck player keeps drawing from the stock until something playable appears, then plays it and ends their turn. Deals last longer, the stock is exhausted more often, and a player who has been unlucky twice in a row can end up holding a dozen cards. It rewards keeping a spread of suits in hand rather than hoarding a wild card.

Background

Mau-Mau is the traditional German shedding game that the modern commercial matching-card games descend from. If you have played one of those you will recognise the shape of it within a turn or two, but this one needs nothing except an ordinary pack of cards. It came out of Germany in the years after the Second World War, with rules in print by 1958 — though German accounts date them to the 1930s and admit that no first sighting of the game has ever been pinned down. It has been a fixture of family card tables in German-speaking countries ever since, which is why almost every household plays it slightly differently.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• kids
• luck
• quick
• travel
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Game Rules, Official Game Rules, Gambiter, CardgamesHub, German Culture, Palace of Cards.

Mus

Also known as Musa

Players

4 players

Deck

1 standard deck stripped to 40 cards (8s, 9s and 10s removed), or a 40-card Spanish pack

Time

45-90 minutes

Difficulty

Complex

Category

Bluffing

Setup

Mus is a four-player partnership game and that is the version everyone means by the name. Partners sit opposite one another so the two sides alternate round the table.

Use a forty-card Spanish pack, or an ordinary pack with the eights, nines and tens taken out, jack standing for the sota, queen for the caballo and king for the rey. Suits do not matter anywhere in the game — there are no flushes, no trumps, and nothing that asks what suit a card is.

Two ranks are impostors, and this single rule shapes almost everything else. Threes play exactly as kings and twos play exactly as aces, in all four betting rounds and for every purpose. The pack therefore behaves as though it holds eight kings and eight aces with only six ranks in between, which makes the highest and lowest cards common enough to fight over and the middle of the pack nearly worthless.

Choose a first dealer at random. The dealer gives four cards to each player one at a time, going anticlockwise, and the rest of the pack stays face down within reach. The player on the dealer's right is the mano: first to speak in every round and the winner of every tie. The dealer is the postre and always speaks last. Both roles move one seat to the right after each hand.

Score with small stones or beans, one pile per side. Points are called stones and five of them make an amarraco — hamarreko in Basque, a word that means a unit of ten rather than of five. The version described here runs to forty stones, eight amarracos. Thirty is the commoner target across most of Spain and forty the northern one, so agree which before the first deal. Twenty-two counters between the two sides cover a forty-point game, because no side ever has more than seven amarracos and four loose stones in front of it at once.

Play

Mus runs in two phases: a public negotiation about whether to redraw, then four separate betting rounds fought over the same four cards.

The discard. Beginning with the mano and going anticlockwise, each player says mus or no hay mus. Only if all four say mus does anything happen: everyone then throws out between one and four cards face down — accounts differ on whether you may agree to mus and then keep all four — and the dealer replaces them from the stock, mano first. The question then comes round again, and there is no limit to how many times it can. The instant one player says no hay mus the discarding is over for that hand and the betting starts. If the stock runs short mid-replacement, shuffle the discards to make a new one — leaving out the discards of the player who is still owed cards, if only one player is short. Note what the question costs you: agreeing to mus tells three other people that what you were dealt is not good enough to keep, and refusing tells them that it is. Speaking first means giving that away first.

Signalling. Partners are allowed, and expected, to tell each other what they hold. The vocabulary is a fixed set of facial signals made across the table while the opponents watch for them: biting the lower lip is two kings, showing the tip of the tongue is two aces, raised eyebrows are duples, a wink is thirty-one, closed eyes are a hand with nothing in it at all. Lists vary by region and clubs publish their own, so settle which are in use before the first deal. What does not vary is the discipline. A signal has to be true: signing a holding you do not have is cheating, and so is inventing a sign the table has not agreed to. All the deception in mus happens in the betting; none of it happens in the signs. A sign may be made at any point in the hand, and catching an opponent mid-signal is a legitimate and much-enjoyed part of playing.

The four rounds. Grande, chica, pares and juego are played in that fixed order, each finished before the next begins.

• Grande is a contest for the highest cards. Compare best card against best card; if those match, compare the second, then the third, then the fourth.
• Chica is the same contest inverted, looking for the lowest hand and comparing from the bottom up.
• Pares is for matched ranks. Everybody first declares truthfully whether they hold anything at all, and only those who do take any part in the round. Two pairs (duples) beat three alike (medias), which beat a single pair (pares); inside a class the higher ranks win, and duples are compared on the better pair first and then on the other. Four alike has no name of its own and just counts as duples of that rank, so four sotas lose to a caballo pair alongside a pair of fives.
• Juego is for a hand whose four cards total thirty-one or more. Again everybody declares yes or no first. If nobody has juego, the round is played as punto instead — a contest for the highest total below thirty-one.

When a declaration round has nobody to argue with. If only one side declares for pares, or only one side for juego, there is nothing to bet against: that side takes the round outright and simply collects for what it holds. If nobody declares pares, the round is skipped and nobody scores from it at all. If nobody declares juego, the round is not skipped: punto is played in its place, betting and all.

Betting a round. The mano speaks first and each player in turn passes or bets. A bet is a number of stones, two at the minimum, and naming no number means two. Opponents may fold, accept, or raise. Folding closes the round with nothing shown and pays at once: one stone if the refused call was the first bet of the round, otherwise the amount of the bet that was standing before it. Refuse a raise to twenty made over a bet of four and you pay four — not one, and not twenty. Accepting leaves the stake on the table to be settled when the cards come up. If all four pass, the round is still compared at the showdown and pays one stone to the better hand.

Ordago. In place of any bet or raise, a player may say ordago: an offer to settle the entire game on that one round. Refused, it pays like any other refusal: one stone if it was the first call of the round, otherwise the bet it was raised over. Accepted, all four hands go face up immediately and whoever wins that round wins the game outright, whatever the score happened to be.

The showdown. When the fourth round is over the hands are revealed and the rounds settled in the order they were played. A tie goes to whichever of the tied players sits nearest the mano, counting the mano first and then round anticlockwise — so the mano wins every tie and the postre loses every tie, while the two players in between beat each other in seating order rather than by side.

Goal & scoring

A game is a race to forty stones and counters change hands twice over at the end of every hand.

First the stakes. Whichever side wins a round takes whatever was accepted on it. A round that was bet and then folded has already paid the bettor one stone during the betting and is never compared or shown, which is why folding cheaply on grande with a hand you intend to win chica with is an ordinary piece of play rather than a surrender. The one thing a refusal does not cancel is the pares and juego bonuses: the side whose bet went unanswered still won that round, so it still collects for the combinations its two members hold, and shows them to claim them. A round everybody passed on is still compared at the showdown and pays one stone to the better hand.

Then the combinations, and this is the part newcomers miss entirely. Pares and juego pay for the holding itself on top of any stake, and both members of the winning side collect for their own hands separately. A partnership that takes the pares round holding a pair on one side and three alike on the other is paid for both, so a strong hand can be worth several stones with nobody having bet a thing. The scale pays most for what is hardest to hold, and juego is not ranked by size — thirty-one exactly is the best hand there is, and a hand of forty loses to one of thirty-two.

Counting. Five stones make an amarraco, usually shown by swapping five small counters for a large one, and eight amarracos — forty stones — win the game. Reaching seven of them obliges you to say dentro, warning the other side aloud that you are within five stones of the finish. A side that crosses forty stops the hand immediately, in the middle of a round if that is where it happens, so the order the rounds are settled in decides some games on its own. The best of three games is a vaca and three vacas usually take the match, though plenty of tables stop at the first vaca and call that the match.

The ordago is what all of this is really for. Because a single round can be made to carry the whole game, the ordinary stones are a currency you are spending to find out how your opponents behave, and the hand where you finally call one is meant to be the hand where you already know.

Variants

Four kings (a cuatro reyes) — In Navarre, La Rioja and parts of the Basque Country the game keeps its older form: the same forty cards, but threes and twos counting as themselves rather than as kings and aces. The pack then holds four kings and four aces, the ranking runs rey, caballo, sota, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, ace, and in the juego a three is worth three points and a two is worth two. Good hands become much rarer, which is the whole point of it — less rides on being dealt an unbeatable hand and more on the betting. The ciego sign for a hopeless hand is generally not recognised in this version, and the four-king pack tends to travel with the forty-point game as the eight-king pack travels with the thirty-point one.

Game length and vacas — Thirty stones is the standard target across most of Spain and forty the northern one. Matches are variously the best of three games, three vacas of three games each, or five games and five vacas. It is worth agreeing before the first deal, because the target changes how reckless an ordago is: staking a game you are two stones from winning is a different proposition from staking one you have barely begun.

Restricted or banned signalling — Published lists of the signs do not agree with one another and none of them claims to be complete — one has a single shrug for a punto of thirty where another distinguishes thirty, twenty-nine and twenty-eight by which shoulder is lifted. Navarre is one of many places where no signs at all are allowed in a game's opening hand. Since the entire balance of the game rests on how much information a partnership can move across the table under the opponents' noses, agreeing the list is the thing most worth doing before you sit down.

Three, five and six players — Three or five play Encaje, also called Mus Francés: the same cards and the same four comparisons, but no partnerships, no ordago, and the object turned inside out. Everyone starts with an equal pile of stones, winning a round lets you throw stones out of the game, players drop out as they empty, and the last one still holding any is the loser. Six can play as two teams of three seated alternately, with the rules and the scoring exactly as in the four-handed game.

• bluffing
• classic
• counting
• long-game
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Naipes Heraclio Fournier, Gambiter, Denexa Games, Ludoteka, Torofun, Bizkaia.eus.

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.

• classic
• family-friendly
• large-group
• party
• reflex
• speed
• strategy
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Official Game Rules, Group Games 101, Gambiter, DKM Games, Game Rules Hub.

Oh Hell

Also known as Oh Pshaw, Blackout, Nomination Whist, Contract Whist, Up and Down the River, Elevator, Bust

Players

3-7 players (best with 5)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards)

Time

30-90 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Three to seven players, everyone for themselves, with one standard 52-card deck. Cards rank in the ordinary way within each suit, ace high down through king, queen, jack and the numbers to the two. There are no partnerships, and the game plays best with four to six.

A game is a fixed series of deals in which the hand size changes every time. The most common shape is an arc: start at the largest hand you have agreed on, drop one card per deal down to a single card, then climb back up to where you started. With five players starting at ten, that is 10, 9, 8 and so on down to 1, then 2, 3 up to 10 again, nineteen deals in total. Other groups run the arc upward only, or downward only, or cut it off at a round number such as seven. Decide the shape and write the sequence at the top of the score sheet before the first card is dealt, because the whole game is scored against it.

The ceiling on hand size is what the deck allows: divide 52 by the number of players and round down. Many groups shave one card off that figure, so that a card is always left over to turn for trump, and most play a shorter arc than the maximum anyway simply to keep the game to a sensible length.

Choose a first dealer at random; the deal then moves clockwise every hand. Deal the agreed number of cards one at a time to each player, then turn the next card of the undealt stock face up. Its suit is trump for that deal. That card belongs to nobody and stays face up beside the remaining stock, which is not used. On a deal that consumes the entire pack there is no card left to turn, so that hand is played with no trump at all.

Rule a grid before you start: one column per player, one row per deal, with space to record each player's bid next to their running total.

Play

Bidding. With the cards dealt and trump turned, each player in turn starting to the dealer's left, and finishing with the dealer, announces out loud exactly how many tricks they intend to win. Bids are spoken in order, not written secretly, so later bidders are better informed than earlier ones. Zero is a legal and frequently correct bid. No bid may exceed the number of cards in the hand.

The hook. Bidding last is less of a privilege than it looks, because one figure is always barred to the dealer: whichever one would leave the table's bids balancing perfectly against the tricks in the hand. Somebody is therefore certain to fail every deal. Say the hand is five cards and the four earlier bids were 1, 2, 0 and 1, totalling four; every number is open to the dealer except 1. This is the rule the game is named for, and it exists to stop a table from politely arranging for everyone to succeed. Where the earlier bids have already overshot what the hand contains, nothing at all is barred to the dealer, since no bid can bring the total back down.

Write every bid on the score sheet before a card is played. Bids cannot be revised once the first lead is made.

The play. Whoever sits on the dealer's left opens, and may open with anything at all — trump included, since nothing here holds it back. Going clockwise, anybody holding the suit that was led has to play one. A player holding none of the led suit may play any card, trump or otherwise, and is under no obligation either to trump or to try to win. Whichever trump on the trick is biggest takes it; with no trump on it, the biggest card of the opening suit does. The winner of the trick leads to the next. On a no-trump deal nothing can beat the opening suit, so its biggest card always wins.

Keep the tricks you win in your own stack rather than a communal pile, since everyone has to be able to count their own at the end. In long hands it is worth restating bids aloud partway through.

The one-card deal. Each player holds a single card and has no decision to make in the play at all, so the entire hand is the bidding: you are guessing whether your card beats everyone else's. These deals swing the scoreboard hard, and they are the reason the arc bottoms out at one card rather than stopping higher.

When the last trick of a deal has been taken, compare each player's count with their bid, score the hand, gather the cards, and pass the deal one seat clockwise. Play continues until the agreed sequence of deals is exhausted.

Goal & scoring

You win by holding the highest total when the agreed run of deals is finished. There is no target to race to and no sudden-death ending; the game is over when the arc is over.

Two methods are in general use, and you have to settle which before the first deal, because they reward completely different bidding.

The one usually described as the most widespread is the generous one: every player takes 1 point per trick won whatever happened, and anybody who hit their bid exactly adds a flat 10 on top. A bid of 2 brought home is 12; missed, it still pays a point a trick, which keeps a trailing player interested.

The other is all-or-nothing. Hit your contract on the nose and the hand pays a flat 10 with the size of the contract added, so a fulfilled 3 is worth 13 and a fulfilled 0 is worth 10; land anywhere else, above or below, and it pays nothing whatever. Overtricks earn no consolation at all — bidding three and taking four is exactly as worthless as bidding three and taking two, which is what makes deliberately dumping a trick on an opponent a real weapon. It swings harder and ends tenser, and it is where the game's other names come from: the scorer blots out every failed bid, leaving the sheet covered in blobs.

A bid of zero is the most dependable score on the sheet, since it pays 10 and requires no cards at all. It is also the hardest thing to defend once someone leads a suit you are void in and you are forced to spend a card that might win.

Ties for first place are normally just shared. Some groups settle them with a single extra one-card deal.

Variants

Alternative scoring schemes — Besides the standard 10 plus bid, two schemes are widespread. The forgiving one gives 1 point per trick taken to everybody plus a 10-point bonus for an exact bid. The punishing one gives 10 plus the square of the bid when you succeed and subtracts the square of the difference when you miss, which makes large bids enormously valuable and near-misses expensive. All three are played under the same name, so ask before you sit down.

No hook (free bidding) — Drop the restriction on the dealer entirely, so the bids may total exactly the number of tricks and every player at the table can theoretically make their contract. The game becomes friendlier and much less cutthroat, since nobody is guaranteed to fail. Some groups compromise by applying the hook only on the smaller hands, where it bites hardest.

Blind one-card deals — On the deal where each player holds one card, nobody looks at their own card. Instead each player holds it face outward against their forehead, so they can see everyone else's card but not their own, and bid on that information. It turns the most luck-heavy deal of the game into a deduction problem and is popular enough that many groups treat it as part of the standard game.

Nomination trump (Contract Whist) — Rather than turning a card for trump, the highest bidder names the trump suit, which is where the alternative name Nomination Whist comes from. Bidding then becomes a genuine auction, since the right to choose trump is worth competing for, and in this form the player who took the auction names the suit and leads to the first trick rather than the player at the dealer's left. Some versions of this form also require the first-hand bid to be made before players look at all of their cards.

Deal-pattern variations — The names attached to this game usually track its deal pattern. Up and Down the River and the British Nomination Whist run the full descending-then-ascending arc. Oh Pshaw generally means the ascending-only version, starting at one card and building up. Elevator and Blackout are used for either direction depending on the region. The rules of play are identical in all of them; only the sequence of hand sizes and hence the length of the game changes.

• classic
• counting
• family-friendly
• large-group
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Trickster Cards, Game Rules, Official Game Rules, PlayingCardDecks.

Old Maid

Also known as Scabby Queen, Black Peter, Schwarzer Peter, Old Bachelor

Players

2-8 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck with one queen removed (51 cards); 2 decks for more than six players

Time

10-20 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Matching & collecting

Setup

Take a standard 52-card deck and pull out one queen, setting it aside. That leaves 51 cards: twelve ranks still complete at four cards each, and queens reduced to three. Everything can be matched into 25 pairs except one queen, which has nothing to go with. That leftover queen is the old maid. With more than six playing, one account has you shuffle two packs together and still take out just the single queen.

Choose a dealer any way you like; cutting for high card works. Shuffle and deal the entire pack out one card at a time, face down, going clockwise, starting with the player on the dealer's left and finishing with the dealer. It will not come out even. Some players end up with one card more than others, and that is fine and does not affect play.

Everyone picks up their hand and looks at it privately. Before the first turn, each player lays down every pair they were dealt, face up in front of them, and takes no further interest in those cards. A pair is two cards of the same rank; suit and colour are irrelevant. If you hold three of a kind, you may only discard two of them and must keep the third. If you hold all four of a rank, put down two pairs. A player whose whole hand pairs off in this opening discard is left with nothing, and is out and safe before the first turn is taken.

Play

Play moves clockwise. Who takes the first turn is not settled between the published accounts: one has the dealer begin, the other the player on the dealer's left. It changes nothing but who is exposed first, so pick one and say so before you start.

On your turn you hold your hand out to the player on your left, spread face down like a fan so the backs are toward them and no faces show. That player takes one card of their choice, blind, and adds it to their hand. If the card they drew makes a pair with something they already hold, they lay that pair down face up at once. If it does not, they simply keep it.

The player who just drew then becomes the one who offers, fanning their own hand face down to the player on their left, and so on around the table. Cards therefore move steadily around the circle, each player always drawing from the neighbour on their right and always offering to the neighbour on their left.

Shuffling your hand before you offer it is the whole skill of the game. Keeping the old maid in one spot, glancing at it, or holding it slightly proud will get it read instantly, especially by children, who are usually better at spotting a tell than adults expect.

When a player's hand becomes empty, whether by laying down a pair or by having their last card drawn away, that player is out and safe. Skip them from then on. Offering and drawing simply pass to the next player who still holds cards, closing the circle up as it shrinks.

The hand ends when every card that can be paired has been paired. At that point exactly one card is left in the game, held by exactly one player: the odd queen. There is no scoring round and no way to unload it once you are the last player holding cards, so the ending is always the same shape.

Goal & scoring

Your aim is to get rid of every card in your hand and, above all, not to be the one holding the unmatched queen at the end.

There is no point scoring. Everyone who empties their hand wins equally, and the single player left with the old maid loses that hand. Position or order of going out does not matter; being out first carries no extra credit. One account notes that the whole thing can be played inverted, with the holder of the odd card winning instead of losing and nothing else about the game changing.

Because the loser is decided entirely by blind draws and by how well people disguise their hands, results swing wildly from deal to deal. For a longer session, play a fixed number of deals and count how many times each person was stuck as the old maid, with the lowest count winning overall. The Turkish form of the game, described in one account, does exactly that with a stopping rule attached: a penalty point for whoever ends up with the odd card, deals repeating until somebody reaches five, and the lowest score wins.

Variants

Dedicated Old Maid deck — Purpose-made children's decks replace the standard pack with illustrated character pairs plus one unpaired Old Maid card. Play is identical, but the matching is by picture rather than rank, which makes it far easier for very young players who cannot yet read card ranks reliably.

Joker as the odd card — Instead of removing a queen, leave the pack complete and add a single joker. All four queens stay in and pair off normally, and the joker is the card nobody wants. It saves fishing a card out of the pack, and it makes the unmatchable card obvious rather than something to be worked out.

Scabby Queen — A British version, recorded in Scotland and under several other names across England. The queen of clubs is the card taken out, which leaves the two red queens to pair with each other and strands the queen of spades — the scabby queen — as the odd card. The loser then draws from the reshuffled pack to find out how many times the deck comes down edgewise on their knuckles: twenty-one for a queen, ten for a jack or a king, and its own face value for anything else. Black means the raps are hard; red means they are soft.

Black Peter — The continental European form. Every country has its own translation of Peter or Black Peter for it — Schwarzer Peter in Germany. The usual pack is a purpose-made one of 31 or 37 cards whose unpartnered card is a chimney sweep, or in other packs a black cat. With ordinary cards, take a 32-card pack and remove one black jack, which leaves the other black jack as the odd one. The loser traditionally gets a black mark drawn on the face with soot or a burnt cork.

Any odd card — Remove a card at random, face down, without anyone seeing which one it was, so nobody knows what the unpairable card is until the hand is nearly over. This kills the strategy of tracking one known queen and stops experienced players from reading the table so easily.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• kids
• luck
• quick
• travel

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards, Gambiter, Card Game Wiki, Ducksters.

Omaha

Also known as Omaha Hold'em, Omaha Holdem, Pot-Limit Omaha, PLO

Players

2-10 players (best with 6)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), plus chips or counters for everyone

Time

30-120 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Bluffing

Setup

Four cards each instead of two, and a rule about how many of them may be used. That is the whole difference from the shared-card game most people learn first, and it changes more than it sounds like it should.

Everyone plays from a stack of chips in front of them. What is on the table is what you can lose in a hand and what you can win from anyone else; you never reach into a pocket mid-hand, though between hands you may usually top up to whatever the table allows. Six players makes the standard game and nine or ten fills a table, but it works down to two.

A marker called the button shows who is nominally dealing, and it moves one seat clockwise after every hand. It decides the order everyone speaks in, so moving it is what shares out the advantage of acting late.

Before any card is dealt, the two players clockwise of the button put in forced bets: the small blind first, then the big blind, usually double it. These exist so that the first hand of the night already has something in the middle worth playing for, and they are how stakes get named — a one-two game means blinds of one and two. Heads-up the order inverts, with the button posting the small blind and acting first before the shared cards appear and last after them.

The dealer then gives four cards face down to each player, one at a time clockwise from the small blind. Nobody sees anyone else's until a showdown, and a hand shown at a showdown must be shown in full — all four, not the two that played.

Cards rank ace high, and the ace also serves as the low end of a five-high run. Suits never break a tie. Equal hands split the pot.

Play

One rule governs everything else, so it comes first. Exactly two of your four cards, and exactly three of the five on the table. Not one, not three, not all four. It is not a maximum and not a minimum, and it applies to every hand you ever make here.

That single sentence is what people misread, and they misread it in the same direction every time. Holding three hearts with two more on the board is not a flush, because only two of yours may play and the board offers only two more. Holding an ace when the board shows four to a straight does not make you that straight either. Read the hand as a fixed shape rather than a pool of seven cards, and it stops catching you out.

A hand runs through four betting rounds, with the dealer turning more shared cards between them.

WHAT YOU CAN DO ON YOUR TURN

• Check. Pass the turn along without staking anything, which is only open to you if nobody has bet yet this round.
• Bet. Be the first to put chips in.
• Call. Match the most anyone has staked this round.
• Raise. Put in more than that, which brings the turn back round to everyone still in.
• Fold. Give the hand up. What you have already staked stays where it is.

A round closes when everyone still holding cards has acted and everyone still in has staked the same amount for that round, all-ins aside. Chips already in the middle are never taken back.

BEFORE THE FLOP

The blinds are live bets, so the round opens on the player clockwise of the big blind, who must at least match it to continue. It runs clockwise and ends on the big blind, who may raise even when nobody else has.

THE FLOP, THE TURN, THE RIVER

The dealer burns a card face down and turns three face up in the middle; a betting round follows. Then a burn and a fourth card, and a round. Then a burn and a fifth, and the last round. From the flop onwards the first player still in clockwise of the button speaks first and the button speaks last.

HOW MUCH YOU MAY BET

Pot limit is the usual structure and the one the game is named for in its commonest form. The ceiling on a bet is what the pot holds; the ceiling on a raise is what the pot would hold once you had called, which is the part worth doing slowly.

Work it in that order. Say the middle holds 50 and someone bets 50, so there is 100 out there. You call the 50 in your head first, making 150, and 150 is what you may raise by. Put in 200 altogether and the pot stands at 300. Repeat that twice and the reason people call pot limit a shove in slow motion is on the table in front of you.

The floor on a raise is the size of the last bet or raise. A short all-in below that does not reopen the betting for anyone who has already acted for the full amount, though it does not restrict a player yet to speak.

All-in works as it does anywhere: you may always put your last chip in, you can win from each opponent only as much as you staked yourself, and anything wagered past that is set aside in a side pot for the players who covered it.

THE SHOWDOWN

If two or more are left after the final round, cards come face up. The last player to bet or raise shows first; if nobody bet, it is the first player clockwise of the button. Beaten hands may be mucked face down rather than shown.

Each player names their best five cards under the two-and-three rule, and a hand in contention has to be shown complete — all four hole cards, including the two that did nothing. A hand can also end long before this: the moment everyone else folds, whoever is left takes the pot without showing anything.

Goal & scoring

There is no running score. Each hand is a fight over one pot, and there are two ways to take it: hold the best five cards at the showdown, or be the last player who has not folded. Nothing distinguishes the two afterwards — an uncontested pot spends the same.

Hands are compared by the standard poker categories, and within a category by rank, with leftover cards settling near-ties in order. The categories are the ones on the strips above and mean here exactly what they mean everywhere else. What differs is which hands are reachable: because three of your five cards always come off the same board everyone shares, made hands run much bigger than players arriving from a two-card game expect. A flush that would win a Hold'em pot outright is an ordinary holding here, and two players making the same straight is common enough that splitting is a normal outcome rather than a curiosity.

The same board also means nobody can hold a hand the board does not offer. If the five shared cards contain no pair and no three of a suit, then nobody at the table has a full house or a flush, whatever they are representing. Reading what is impossible is most of what separates players here.

Equal hands split the pot; an odd chip goes to the first player clockwise of the button. Where all-ins have built side pots, each is settled on its own among the players who were in it, so a short stack can take the main pot while a stronger hand collects everything above it.

A cash game has no end: chips are stakes, you may join or leave between hands, and your result is whatever is in front of you when you stand up. A tournament ends when one player holds every chip, with equal starting stacks, blinds rising on a clock, and finishing position rather than chip count deciding where you came.

Variants

Omaha hi-lo, eight or better — The pot is divided between the best high hand and the best qualifying low one. A low has to be five cards of different ranks, none higher than an eight, and straights and flushes do not count against it, so the best possible low is A-2-3-4-5 — which is also a straight, and can therefore win both halves at once. The two-and-three rule applies separately to each half, so the two cards making your low need not be the two making your high. When no low qualifies, the high hand takes everything. Sharing half a pot with another low is called being quartered, and it is how a hand that looked strong ends up losing money.

Five-card Omaha, and Big O — Five hole cards each rather than four, with the showdown rule untouched: still exactly two from your hand and three from the board. The extra card multiplies the possible two-card combinations from six to ten, which raises the winning hand again and makes the game markedly looser. Played high-only it is usually called five-card Omaha; played hi-lo eight-or-better it is Big O.

Courchevel — Five hole cards, and the first of the shared cards is turned face up before the opening bets rather than as part of the flop. Everyone therefore acts before the flop already knowing a fifth of the board, and the flop itself adds only two more cards. Played both high and hi-lo.

No-limit and fixed-limit Omaha — The same game with a different ceiling on the betting. Fixed limit, once the standard form, keeps every bet at a set size and caps the raises in a round, which suits hi-lo where hands are often split and building a huge pot serves nobody. No limit exists but is rare, because four cards make strong hands so often that threatening a whole stack loses much of its meaning.

• betting
• bluffing
• large-group
• long-game
• strategy
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia.

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.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• family-friendly
• luck
• party
• quick
• travel

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Official Game Rules, Game Rules, Cats at Cards, Gambiter, Bar Games 101.

Pinochle

Also known as Pinocle, Penuchle, Partnership Auction Pinochle

Players

2-4 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 pinochle deck (48 cards: two each of A, 10, K, Q, J, 9 in every suit), which you can build from two standard decks by keeping only those ranks

Time

45-90 minutes

Difficulty

Complex

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

This entry describes single-deck partnership auction Pinochle: four players, two fixed partnerships, one 48-card pinochle pack. Double-deck partnership Pinochle, which is at least as widely played in North America, is described under variants.

Each suit is twelve deep rather than thirteen, because it holds only six ranks and holds each of them twice: ace, ten, king, queen, jack, nine. Forty-eight cards in all. Rank within a suit is not what you expect: the ace is high, but the ten sits second, above the king. The full order is A, 10, K, Q, J, 9 from high to low. When two identical cards meet in the same trick, the one played first outranks the copy.

Partners face one another across the table. Settle the first deal however you like, high cut being usual, then pass the deal clockwise. Shuffle, cut, and deal every card out clockwise in packets of three or four until each player holds twelve. There is no stock and no widow in this version; all 48 cards are in hands from the start.

Rule a score sheet with one column per partnership. Each hand produces a bid, a meld figure and a trick figure for each side before anything is combined, so leave room to write all three rather than only a running total.

Agree two house questions before the first deal, because tables differ and both change how you bid: whether the contracting side exchanges four cards after naming trump, and whether you are playing to 1000 points or some other target.

Play

A hand runs in three stages: the auction, the meld, then twelve tricks.

The auction. Bidding opens with the player to the dealer's left and moves clockwise. A bid is the number of points your side undertakes to score this hand, meld and captured counters combined. The usual minimum opening bid is 250, though 200 and 300 are both common house figures, and each later bid must beat the previous one, normally in steps of 10. Passing puts you out of the auction for the rest of that hand: you cannot come back in when the bidding returns to you. The auction therefore ends as soon as three of the four players have passed, whether or not those passes were consecutive, and the one player still live holds the contract for their side. A passed-out auction is handled in one of three ways, so choose in advance: require the player to the dealer's left to open at the minimum so that there is always a contract, which is the most common fix; oblige the dealer to take it at the minimum; or throw the hand in, pass the deal and redeal.

Naming trump and the pass. Whoever wins the auction declares the trump suit. An exchange of four cards each way is common at that point: the partner picks four, slides them across the table face down, and the bidder, after studying them, sends four back. Nothing obliges the bidder to return what arrived — four cards out of the original holding is equally legal, as is any mixture of the two. Where no exchange is used the bidding runs distinctly more cautious, which is precisely why this belongs on the list of things settled before cards are dealt.

Melding. All four players lay their scoring combinations face up on the table at once. Each side adds its meld aloud, the totals are written down, and the cards are then taken back into hand before any card is played. Only what is in your hand at that moment counts; nothing you capture later in the play can be added to it. Overlap between combinations of unlike kinds is allowed, so a single physical card can earn its keep several times over. Hold the spade queen and she pays inside the spade marriage, again inside the pinochle alongside the diamond jack, and a third time inside the set of four queens, all from the one card. What is barred is spending a card twice on the same kind of combination, so a spade queen sitting between two spade kings still yields a single marriage rather than a pair of them. None of it is banked until you take a trick, though: a side that goes through the whole play without winning even one records nothing for everything it laid down.

The tricks. The high bidder leads to the first trick and play runs clockwise. Give this one a moment before you start, because it is the rule most likely to differ from what somebody at the table learned: in the auction game the lead belongs to the contractor, but the versions of partnership Pinochle played without an auction hand it to the player at the dealer's left instead. The rules for playing a card are strict, which is the feature that separates Pinochle from most trick games:

• If you can follow suit you must, and if you can also beat the highest card of that suit already played, you must do that as well.
• Void in the suit led, you are obliged to trump if you have anything to trump with, and that obligation stands even when your trump is already beaten.
• If the trick has already been trumped and you cannot follow suit, you must beat the trump on the table when you are able; holding only lower trumps, you must still play one of them.
• Only when you can neither follow suit nor trump may you play whatever you like.

That third rule is the one point of the play that varies: a minority of tables let a player who cannot overtrump discard instead. Settle it before the opening lead.

Any trump beats any plain card, so the trick belongs to the highest trump played to it. Where nobody trumped, it goes to whoever played the highest card of the led suit. Between two identical cards, the one led or played earlier wins. The winner of a trick leads to the next. When all twelve tricks are gone, the side that took the last trick claims a bonus, both sides count the counters they captured, and the hand is scored.

One consequence of the must-beat rule worth planning for: you cannot quietly duck a trick to protect a ten. If you hold the ace and the ten of a led suit and an opponent's ace is already on the table, you are compelled to play your own ace, and your ten is exposed for the rest of the hand.

Goal & scoring

The counters are the aces, tens and kings. In the point-count scheme most tables now use, each counter captured in a trick is worth 10 to the side that took it, and queens, jacks and nines are worth nothing. Twenty-four counters make 240, and the last trick is worth an extra 10, so exactly 250 points are available in tricks every hand. The older values, still in use, are ace 11, ten 10, king 4, queen 3, jack 2 with 10 for the last trick, which comes to the same 250.

Meld values in the single-deck game:

• Run in trump (A-10-K-Q-J of trump): 150. Both trump runs at once: 1500, although some tables score them simply as 150 apiece.
• Royal marriage, the king and queen of trump: 40.
• Plain marriage, king and queen of any other suit: 20 each.
• Dix, the nine of trump: 10 each, so 20 for the pair.
• Pinochle, the queen of spades with the jack of diamonds: 40. Double pinochle: 300.
• Aces around, one ace of each suit: 100. Double: 1000.
• Kings around: 80. Double: 800.
• Queens around: 60. Double: 600.
• Jacks around: 40. Double: 400.

A run already contains the royal marriage, so you do not also claim the 40 for it.

Settling a hand. Each side totals its meld together with the counters it captured. Where the contractors have matched or beaten the number they bid, both columns simply take what was earned. Falling short is another matter: the contract is set, everything the contracting pair earned that hand evaporates, and their column takes a penalty the size of the bid itself, which is quite capable of pushing a total into the negatives. Some groups soften that by letting a set side keep the meld it laid down and only deducting the bid; the harsher version given here is the more common one. The defending side scores its meld and counters as normal, subject to the same requirement that meld needs at least one trick to stand, which means a defending pair shut out of every trick records nothing at all for the hand.

The game runs to an agreed total, with 1000 and 1500 both in common use, and the first side past it wins. Should both sides cross in the same deal, the declaring side takes the game whatever the two totals actually are — they carried the contract, so they get the benefit of arriving first. The customary tie-break is that the contracting side's score is settled first, so if both sides cross the target in the same hand the contractors win, having taken the risk. Some groups play to 1500, and some let a side stop play mid-hand to claim the game.

Variants

Double-deck partnership Pinochle — Four players in partnerships with an 80-card pack: two pinochle decks combined with all the nines removed, so four copies of A, 10, K, Q and J in each suit. Everyone gets 20 cards. Bidding opens at 50 and rises in steps of one or five. Meld values are roughly a tenth of the single-deck figures, so a trump run is 15, aces around 10, kings around 8, queens around 6, jacks around 4, a royal marriage 4, a plain marriage 2, a pinochle 4 and a double pinochle 30. Counters are the aces, tens and kings at 1 point each, 48 in total, plus 2 for the last trick, giving 50 points in tricks per hand. Game is 500. There is no card pass, and the same must-follow, must-beat, must-trump rules apply. Many North American players regard this as the standard modern form of the game.

Two-handed Pinochle — The classic head-to-head game, and the oldest form. Each player gets 12 cards from the 48-card pack and the remaining 24 form a face-down stock with its top card turned up to set trump. There is no auction. After each trick the winner may lay down one meld and score it immediately, then draws the top card of the stock while the loser takes the next, so both are back to 12 cards. On winning a trick you may also swap the dix, the nine of trump, for the exposed trump card. Suit-following and must-beat rules do not apply while the stock lasts; once it is exhausted, including the final face-up trump, the last 12 tricks are played under the strict follow, beat and trump rules. Counters score as in the four-handed game and the last trick is worth 10. Game is usually 1000, and if both players cross the target in the same hand the one with the higher total wins.

Three-handed Auction Pinochle — The best-known solo form, played with the 48-card pack. Each of the three players gets 15 cards and three go face down as a widow. Players bid, minimum usually 300, and the high bidder turns the widow face up, takes it in, names trump, and buries any three cards, which count toward the bidder's own trick score if they are counters. The bidder then plays alone against the other two, who cooperate. The bidder must reach the bid with meld plus counters or be set for the amount bid; the defenders score nothing but the satisfaction of setting the contract, and games are frequently settled per hand in chips rather than by a target total.

Traditional counter values — Instead of counting each ace, ten and king as 10, some tables use the historical values of ace 11, ten 10, king 4, queen 3 and jack 2, with the nine worth nothing and 10 for the last trick. The total available is identical at 250, but the distribution differs, making individual aces and tens relatively more valuable and kings less so. Worth confirming which scheme is in use before bidding, since it slightly shifts what a hand is worth.

• classic
• counting
• long-game
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, Trickster Cards, Denexa Games.

Piquet

Also known as Rubicon Piquet

Players

2 players

Deck

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

Time

45-75 minutes

Difficulty

Complex

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Take a pack and throw out everything from the six down, leaving thirty-two cards running seven, eight, nine, ten, jack, queen, king, ace, with the ace high. There is no trump suit in this game at any point.

Cut for the deal. The small edge in a partie belongs to whoever does not deal its sixth and final hand, and because the deal alternates that is the player who dealt the first one — so the winner of the cut should elect to deal.

Twelve cards to each player, in twos or threes as the dealer prefers, and the remaining eight go face down in the middle as the talon. Whichever rhythm the dealer picks, they must use it for their other two deals.

The names matter and will be used throughout. Whoever dealt is younger hand for that deal; their opponent is elder hand. Elder does nearly everything first — exchanges first, declares first, leads first — and that head start is the compensation for not having dealt.

One thing is worth checking before anything else happens. A hand containing no jack, queen or king at all is carte blanche and scores 10 outright. Say so the moment you notice. You prove it by dealing your hand rapidly face up after your opponent has discarded and before you discard yourself — and if you are elder, you have to announce how many cards you mean to exchange first, so that younger can choose their own discards without having seen your hand.

Play

The exchange comes first and is the hardest decision in the game. Elder discards between one and five cards face down and draws the same number off the top of the talon. Younger then discards between one and whatever elder did not take — three, ordinarily — and draws to match. Anyone taking fewer than their maximum must say so before drawing. Keep your own discards beside you; you are allowed to look back at them later, and you will want to.

What the two players are doing is different. Elder, with five cards and the lead, should be building the best hand available and not thinking about defence at all; it is almost always right to take the full five. Younger, with three, has to hedge — hold something that stops elder's long suit, keep a guarded queen or king where you can — while still going for combinations. The asymmetry is the game.

A courtesy that follows from the arithmetic: elder taking fewer than five may look at the rest of the five, and younger taking fewer than allowed may show the leftovers to both players once elder has led.

Then the declarations, which is where most of the points are. Three categories, and in each one only the better holding scores anything at all:

• Point — your longest suit, scoring one for each card in it.
• Sequence — three cards or more, all of one suit and adjacent in rank, counting the longest such run you hold.
• Set — three or four cards of one rank, and only ranks of ten or better; nines, eights and sevens do not count.

Elder announces first, taking the categories in that order, and younger answers each announcement with one word. "Good" concedes it. "Not good" claims a better one. "Equal" asks for more detail, and elder gives it — and if the two are genuinely identical, neither player scores that category at all.

Ties break like this. Points of the same length are settled on pip total, counting each court card as ten and each ace as eleven. Sequences of the same length are settled on the top card, so ace-king-queen beats king-queen-jack. Any four of a kind beats any three, and two of the same size are settled on rank.

Winning a category is worth more than the one combination that won it: whoever has the best sequence also scores every other sequence in their hand, and whoever has the best set scores their other sets too. The loser of the category scores none of theirs, however many they were holding.

You are not obliged to declare anything. Sinking a declaration — staying quiet about a holding you expect to lose, or one that would tell your opponent too much about your hand — is legitimate and sometimes correct. The price is that it is irrevocable: once elder has announced something, elder cannot go back and claim a better one after hearing "not good".

Elder then leads to the first trick, and only after that lead does younger announce and score the categories where they said "not good" or where elder stayed silent.

Twelve tricks are then played out. Nothing is trump, following the led suit is compulsory, and either player may look back through the completed tricks whenever they like. Points come in a steady trickle: one for leading to a trick, one more for taking a trick that your opponent led, and one extra for taking the last one.

Goal & scoring

A match is a partie of six deals with the deal alternating, and the higher total at the end of it wins. Level after six, play two more; level after those, call it a draw.

Each player calls out their running total for the hand as they score, so both totals are public throughout — there is no hidden bookkeeping in Piquet, only hidden cards.

The margin is what is actually settled, and there is a trapdoor in it. Beat your opponent and you take the difference between the two totals plus 100. But if the loser failed to reach 100 points across the whole partie, they have not got over the rubicon, and instead of the difference you take the sum of both scores plus 100. The effect is brutal and deliberate: losing 99 to 120 costs 319, while losing 101 to 120 costs 119. Scraping past 100 is worth more to a losing player than almost anything else on the table.

The two big bonuses are what make an ordinary hand occasionally enormous.

Repique is worth 60, and goes to a player who reaches 30 in declarations alone before their opponent has scored anything whatever. For deciding whether that happened, the score is reckoned in a strict order regardless of when things were said: carte blanche, then point, then sequences, then sets, then anything made in play. So a player who racks up 30 from sequences and sets does not get a repique if the opponent held the better point, because the point is counted first.

Pique is worth 30, for reaching 30 from declarations and play together before the opponent has scored at all. Here the points count in the order they genuinely fell, which quietly puts the bonus out of younger hand's reach for good. Younger declares nothing until elder has led, and that lead is itself worth a point — so by the time younger can score at all, the opponent is never on nothing. Pique is elder's bonus and nobody else's. The 40 for capot cannot be counted towards the thirty; whether the 10 for the cards may is disputed, and the variants take it up.

A category that ties, with neither player scoring, does not shield anybody from either bonus.

At the end of the twelve tricks, whoever took the majority scores 10 for the cards. Six tricks each scores nobody anything. Taking all twelve is capot and pays 40 in place of the 10 — rare, and usually the end of that partie's suspense.

Variants

Piquet au cent — The older game the modern one grew out of, and still played. Instead of a fixed six deals, a game runs until somebody reaches 100 points or more, and getting there while your opponent is still short of 50 wins a double game; a partie is then the best of five games, with a double counting as two. The rubicon disappears along with the six-deal format, which changes the whole shape of a losing position — there is no longer any reason to grind out a hundred, only to arrive first. Accounts differ on how much else travels under the name: some treat it simply as a different finish, others as the full early package described below.

The early thirty-six card game — How Piquet was played around 1650, and worth trying once for the shape of it. The sixes stay in, making thirty-six cards; the talon is twelve rather than eight; and elder hand may exchange up to seven. With that much of the pack passing through the players' hands the declarations grow far bigger and far more contested, and the discard — already the hardest decision in the modern game — turns into something close to a puzzle. It is normally played to a hundred points, which is why some writers file it and Piquet au cent under a single heading.

Trick points only for tens and above — Found in some forms of the hundred-point game. A point is scored during play only when the card led, or the card that takes the trick, is a ten or better; anything lower earns nothing. The consequence is the interesting part. In the standard game elder hand takes a point simply for opening the play, whatever the card, and that is precisely what puts a pique out of younger hand's reach forever. Under this rule an elder who opens with a nine, an eight or a seven scores nothing at all — and younger can score a pique after all.

Ten for the last trick — Award 10 points for taking the final trick instead of the customary 1. A small change on the score sheet and a large one to the endgame: keeping a stopper back for trick twelve stops being worth a tidy extra point and becomes worth as much as the cards, so both players have to plan the closing tricks rather than simply cashing winners in order.

Claiming the cards early — Settle this one before you start, because the published accounts part company over it. On one reading, a player who has taken seven tricks may announce the 10 for cards at that moment and count it towards the thirty needed for a pique. On the other, the 10 is not settled until the play is over, by which time the opponent has almost certainly scored something and the question cannot arise. The disagreement is traced to a nineteenth-century law that rules a capot out of a pique and says nothing either way about the cards. Piques are a good deal easier to come by under the first reading, which is reason enough to agree on it in advance.

Background

Piquet was already well established by 1650 in a form a modern player would recognise, and for exactly two people there is still very little to touch it — though it is a game for enthusiasts now rather than a household fixture, and has been since about 1918. What follows is the version the English-speaking world settled on from the late nineteenth century, codified by Cavendish in 1882 and known in the books as Rubicon Piquet — the older hundred-point game is in the variants. It asks a lot at the start — there is French vocabulary, there are three separate scoring categories before a card is played, and there are two bonuses large enough to decide a match on their own — and it repays every bit of it. Learn it over an evening rather than in ten minutes.

• classic
• counting
• long-game
• strategy
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Parlett Games.

Pitch

Also known as Setback, High-Low-Jack, Auction Pitch, Blind All Fours

Players

2-7 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards)

Time

30-60 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Pitch is All Fours with an auction bolted on, and the auction is what makes it. The English original turned a card up to fix trump; here somebody bids for the right to choose it, and then chooses it by leading — which is what pitching means and where the name comes from.

The game runs two ways and the rules are identical for both. Four people in two partnerships, sitting opposite their partner, is the ordinary social form and plays to 21. Everyone for themselves — cutthroat — takes two or more. Nothing about the auction or the trick-play changes, and it has no target of its own, so 21 stands unless you agree something shorter. Fix which form you are using before you deal, along with the target, because it is the one thing this game genuinely varies on.

Cut for first deal; it then moves clockwise, as does play. Deal six cards to each player in packets of three. The rest of the pack is set aside and is not used, so at four players 28 of the 52 cards never appear at all, rather more than half the pack. That is why the whole game hinges on what happens to be in play rather than on what exists.

Cards rank as you would expect, ace down to two, and there is no trump suit at all until the first card of the first trick is led.

One sheet of paper, one column per side, plus and minus. Scores go negative here often enough that people say "in the hole" rather than "minus three", and if you are keeping score with counters instead, hand each side twenty-one and take them away.

Play

The bidding is a single round and then it is over. Starting to the dealer's left, each player either passes or names a number higher than the last bid. Two is the minimum anyone may bid and four is the top of the ordinary range; five is available only as smudge, which is a claim on all six tricks as well as all four points. Some accounts of auction pitch put the floor at one instead, so agree it if you are playing with people who learned the game elsewhere.

The dealer bids last and has two privileges for it. The dealer may steal the bid by matching the highest bid rather than beating it, and if everyone else has passed, the dealer is forced to bid at least two rather than being allowed to throw the hand in. Both are worth knowing before you sit down, because they change what a marginal hand is worth in third seat. Not everyone plays the force: some accounts have the deal simply thrown in and dealt again by the same dealer when nobody bids.

Whoever ends up highest is the pitcher. There is no announcement of a trump suit: the pitcher leads to the first trick, and whatever suit that card is, that is trump for the hand. Naming it and playing it are the same act, which means the pitcher cannot bluff about it and the rest of the table learns the suit and the pitcher's opening card at the same moment.

The rule that makes the play unlike most trick-taking games: you may always trump. Faced with a suit you hold, you must either follow it or play a trump — those are the two legal options, and choosing the trump is entirely allowed. What you may not do is discard something else while holding the suit led. That is a revoke, and it costs the offender the value of the bid.

Holding none of the suit led, you may play anything at all.

A trick belongs to whoever put the biggest trump into it; where nobody trumped at all, it belongs to the best card of whatever suit opened. Its winner leads to the next, and six tricks empty the hands.

Because you may trump at will, the hand is not a contest to take tricks. It is a contest to take four specific things, and a trick with nothing in it is worth nothing. Expect people to throw away winners and to trump their own side's high card to drag a scoring trump out of the trick.

Goal & scoring

First side to the target wins — and there is a condition on that which decides more games than it sounds like it should. You can only win on a hand you bid and made. Reaching 21 on points scavenged off somebody else's contract leaves you stuck there, unable to close it out, while they bid three, make it and win from 18. The rule keeps the last few points honest and stops a game ending by accident.

So what is being bid for. Four points are on offer in every hand, and all four live in or around the trump suit:

• High, for the top trump that was dealt at all. Not necessarily the ace — if no ace of trumps came out, the king is high, and so on down.
• Low, for the bottom trump that was dealt. Not necessarily the two, by the same argument.
• Jack, for the jack of trumps. Unlike the other three this one can simply fail to exist: if the jack of trumps was never dealt, nobody gets the point and there are only three to be had that hand.
• Game, for taking the most pips in tricks, counting tens as ten, aces four, kings three, queens two and jacks one. Eighty pips in the pack, and a tie awards nothing.

High goes to whoever was dealt it, so that point is settled before a card is played and cannot be taken away. Jack and Game go to whoever ends up with the cards, which is why a hand can be won by ambushing one trick and losing the other five. Low belongs to neither camp cleanly, and that is the next paragraph.

Low is where accounts genuinely part company, and they part company over which rule is the ordinary one. Some score it for the player who was dealt the lowest trump and treat the alternative as a variation; others give the point to whichever side captures that card once it is played, and treat that as the rule. Neither version is the clear majority, so this entry does not pick one. The difference is not a detail — it turns the two of trumps from a card you merely hold into one you have to shepherd home — so settle it before the first deal.

Now the settlement, and the mechanism the game's other name is built on. Make your bid and you score everything you took, not merely what you bid — bid two, take all four, score four. Fall short and nothing you took counts: you are set back the amount you bid, which comes straight off the total and can put you below zero. Meanwhile your opponents score whatever they picked up, whether or not they were involved in the auction. Smudge is the exception in both directions: bid it and make it for five, bid it and drop a single trick and you are five worse off, and the hand still has to be played to the end so the other side can collect.

One last piece of bookkeeping, for the hand where two sides both cross the target at once. Award the points strictly in order — the pitcher's first, then High, Low, Jack and Game — and whoever arrives first has won it.

Variants

Draw after the pitch — Once trump is out, everyone discards face down whatever they do not want and the dealer tops their hand back up to six from the undealt part of the pack. Trumps may not be thrown, and normally players bin everything else and hope. It is a common addition to the partnership game, and it changes the character completely: the ace, the two and the jack of trumps nearly always reach the table, so High, Low and Jack stop being lotteries about what was dealt and become things you have to win.

Cutthroat Pitch — Every player for themselves, from two upwards, with the bidding and play exactly as in the partnership game and the same 21-point target; shorter games get played, but no fixed alternative target is standard. It plays quite differently despite the identical rules, because the entire table has a shared interest in setting whoever won the auction, and an informal alliance forms and dissolves every hand. This is the version card books tend to describe, and traditionally the one played for money.

Ten-point Pitch — The mid-western expansion, and a much bigger game. Two distinguishable jokers join the pack, and the off-jack — the other jack of the trump colour — is promoted into the trump suit. Trumps then run ace, king, queen, jack, off-jack, high joker, low joker, ten and down. Each of the three newcomers carries its own point, taking the total to seven, and awarding three more for the trey of trumps takes it to ten. Deal is nine cards each at four players, with the remainder left as a widow.

Pedro and Cinch — Promote the five of trumps into a scoring card worth five points on its own, and the hand is suddenly worth nine rather than four; that game is Pedro. Add the other five of the same colour, also worth five, and the total reaches fourteen and the game is Cinch, or Double Pedro. Both are properly separate games rather than house rules, with their own bidding conventions, but they grew directly out of tables adding one more thing to chase.

No junk points — Only the bidding side scores. Make the bid and take your points as usual; fail and be set back as usual, but the opposition collect nothing either way. It removes the consolation prize and with it most of the reason to fight over a hand you cannot win, so play becomes flatter and games run longer. Worth knowing because it is common enough that somebody will assume it.

• classic
• counting
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards.

President

Also known as Scum, Asshole, Presidents and Assholes, Bum, Rich Man, Poor Man, Capitalism, Warlords and Scumbags

Players

3-8 players (best with 5)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers usually removed

Time

20-45 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Shedding

Setup

Use a full 52-card pack with the jokers taken out. Suits do nothing at all in this game; only rank matters. The order runs, from strongest down, 2, ace, king, queen, jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3. The two is the top card and the three is the bottom one, which catches out anyone expecting the usual ace-high order.

For the opening deal of a session, pick a dealer by drawing cards. Deal the entire pack out one card at a time, clockwise. Unless the player count divides into 52 evenly, some players end up with one card more than others, and that is simply accepted rather than corrected. Nobody has a stock or a discard pile of their own; everything is in hand.

The first hand of a session starts with the player to the dealer's left, since no social ranks exist yet. A common alternative is that whoever holds the three of clubs must lead it as the first play.

Every hand after the first begins with an exchange and, usually, a reshuffle of the seating. Once the ranks exist, players sit in order around the table: the President takes the best chair, the Vice-President sits to their left, then the Citizens, with the Vice-Scum and finally the Scum on the President's right. Who deals is not agreed: one account gives the job to the Scum, as part of the point of being the Scum, and another to the President. Either way the cards go out clockwise from the President's seat.

Play

Whoever is on lead sets the shape of the round: one card, or several of matching rank — a pair of fives, three jacks, four sevens. Suits are ignored, so a pair is just two cards of matching rank. Whatever the leader plays sets the size of that round.

Going clockwise, your only options are to pass or to top what is showing. Beating it means matching the count exactly — same quantity as the lead, all one rank between them, and that rank higher than what is showing on top. A single nine is beaten by a single ten or higher. A pair of nines falls only to a higher pair, never to a single card and never to three of a kind. The size of the play cannot be changed part way through a round.

In the standard game passing is always allowed even when you could legally play, and passing does not shut you out. If the round comes back to you, you may play again. A great many groups play the stricter version in which a pass takes you out of the round for good, so agree on this before you deal; it makes a real difference to how you hold your twos.

Play keeps circling the table for as long as somebody can top what is showing. The moment it runs the full way round without anyone beating the play on top, that play has taken the round. Those cards are finished with: flip the whole lot over, push it clear of the playing area, and it takes no further part in the hand. Whoever owned the winning play now opens the next round, free to lead a single, a pair or any larger set they fancy. If that same play happened to empty their hand, the opening passes clockwise to the nearest player who still has cards.

You are out as soon as you play your final card or cards, and you take the highest social rank still unclaimed. The first player out is the President, the second is the Vice-President, everybody in between is a Citizen or Neutral, the second-to-last is the Vice-Scum, and the very last player, left sitting with cards nobody wanted, is the Scum. Some groups stop the hand the moment the Scum is the only player left; others make them play their remaining cards out for the entertainment value. It makes no difference to the result.

Before the next hand is played, the ranks pay out. The simplest form, and the one both published accounts give as the base, is a single card: the Scum hands over their best card, strongest by the actual rank order and with no quietly holding a two back, and the President returns one of their own choosing, under no obligation to part with their worst. Tables with a Vice tier usually scale it, so that the number of cards matches the number of ranks involved: two from the Scum to the President and one from the Vice-Scum to the Vice-President, with the same number coming back each way. Anyone ranked Citizen neither gives nor receives. There is no rule against returning exactly what just arrived, odd as that would look. All of this is settled once the cards are dealt and before the first lead.

Once the exchange is settled, the President leads to the first round of the hand. Some groups instead give the opening lead to the Scum as a small consolation. Either convention works as long as everyone uses the same one.

Goal & scoring

The immediate goal in each hand is to shed your cards before everyone else and come out as President. The longer-term goal is to stay at the top, because the card exchange means the President starts each new hand with better cards than they were dealt and the Scum starts with worse. Most groups play with no written score at all: the game is about holding the President's chair, and it ends when people have had enough.

If you want a score, the published method is 2 points for the President, 1 for the Vice-President and nothing for anybody else. Play a fixed number of hands, or to an agreed target, and the highest total wins. Playing an agreed number of hands rather than to a target is fairer, since the last few hands otherwise favour whoever is already President. Break a tie on points by counting who took the President's chair more often over the session, and if that is level too, play one more hand and let it settle the matter.

Two details worth settling early. A player who goes out on their last play still ranks ahead of anyone still holding cards regardless of how the rest of the round finishes. And if two hands in a row leave the same person as Scum, some groups apply an extra penalty such as a three-card exchange, while others leave it alone.

Variants

Passing locks you out — Once you pass, you are finished for that round and cannot play again until the pile is cleared and a fresh lead is made. One account reports it from Australia; it is common enough elsewhere that many players assume it is the rule, and it is closer to how the Chinese and Japanese ancestors of the game work. It changes how you hold your twos completely, so settle it before the deal. Two related tightenings travel with it: some tables make beating compulsory whenever you can, and some give each player exactly one opportunity to answer a lead before the highest play takes the round.

Bombs and revolution — Four of a kind, played all at once, is a bomb. Depending on the group it either clears the pile immediately, letting the bomber lead again, or it turns the entire rank order upside down for the rest of the hand so that threes become the strongest card and twos the weakest. A second four of a kind restores the normal order. Some tables run a lighter version in which any single two, or a set of twos, clears the pile on its own without having to beat what is on the table.

Completing the set clears the pile — If your play makes four cards of the same rank sit on top of the pile, counting what previous players contributed rather than just your own cards, the pile is swept away at once and you lead the next round. Playing a pair of kings onto a pair of kings does it. This adds a lot of tactical bite, because it gives a low-ranked player a way to seize the lead without owning the highest cards, and it makes people think twice about splitting a set.

Daifugō (Dai Hinmin) — The Japanese game that President descends from, still widely played and considerably more developed. Jokers are included as wild cards. Playing an eight clears the pile immediately, the rule known as eight-cut, and the player who did it leads again. Four of a kind triggers a revolution that reverses the rank order, and a second one reverses it back. Sequence runs of three or more cards in the same suit can be played as a unit in some versions. Several rules ban going out on a two, a joker or an eight, so a hand that ends on one of those forces the player to take the bottom rank instead of the top.

Table rules and the party version — The reason the game is more often called Asshole than President. The Scum shuffles, deals, clears the pile between rounds, and fetches drinks. The President may invent a rule that holds until they are dethroned, commonly something like a ban on using players' real names or on speaking out of turn. Breaking a rule costs a drink, and so does being caught with a card you should have played. None of this touches the underlying card game, but it is how most people actually encounter it.

Bigger sets beat smaller ones — Some groups drop the requirement to match the size of the lead. In the looser form you may play more cards than the player before you provided they are also higher in rank, so a single eight falls to a single ten or a pair of tens but not to a pair of fives. In the loosest form a bigger set beats a smaller one whatever the ranks, which turns a hoarded four of a kind into an answer to anything and makes the count, rather than the rank, the thing to watch.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• large-group
• party
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards, Britannica, Game Rules, Official Game Rules, Cats at Cards, Gambiter, Denexa Games.

Pyramid

Also known as Pyramid Solitaire, Solitaire Thirteen, Pile of Twenty-Eight

Players

1 player

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards)

Time

5-15 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Solitaire (1 player)

Setup

Shuffle a full 52-card deck and build the pyramid face up in seven rows. Lay one card at the top, then two below it, then three, and so on down to a bottom row of seven, for 28 cards in all. Offset each row so that every card rests on and partly covers the two cards above it, and so that each card in turn is partly covered by the two below it. Only the seven cards of the bottom row start out completely uncovered.

The remaining 24 cards form the stock to one side, squared up face down — though some accounts and some computer versions leave it face up, which shows you what is coming without changing a rule. Leave space next to it for a waste pile and space somewhere clear for discards. Ranks count as numbers throughout: ace is 1, jack is 11, queen is 12, king is 13, and every other card is its face value. Suit and colour never matter.

Play

A card is available only when nothing overlaps it. In the pyramid that means both cards below it have already been removed. The bottom row is available from the start; each removal frees the cards above once their other supporter also goes.

Remove available cards in pairs that add to exactly 13. The pairings are ace with queen, 2 with jack, 3 with 10, 4 with 9, 5 with 8, and 6 with 7. Kings are worth 13 on their own, so any available king is removed by itself at any time. That holds wherever the king is: an uncovered king in the pyramid and a king sitting on top of the waste can each be discarded singly. Removed cards are set aside for good and never come back into play.

Both cards of a pair must be available at the moment you take them, but they need not be in the same place. You may pair two uncovered pyramid cards, or one pyramid card with the top card of the waste. Two pyramid cards that sit side by side in the same row can be paired normally, since neither covers the other. What you cannot do is use a card that is still covered, however visible its rank is.

When you want a new card, turn the top card of the stock face up onto the waste. Only the top of the waste is live; the cards under it are buried until it is played. Play the turned card immediately if you can, or leave it and turn another. The card you just turned may be paired with the previous top of the waste, so two consecutive stock cards summing to 13 clear each other.

Draw at your own pace, and take any legal removal at any time. Nothing is ever compulsory: you may decline a pair that is sitting right in front of you, and deliberately leaving one card of a matched pair in place to save a rank for later is a standard tactic, as is holding a convenient card on top of the waste while you work through the pyramid. Equally, there is no obligation to draw while useful pairings remain on the table.

The strict traditional rule gives you a single pass through the stock and no redeal, and that is what this entry assumes. Accounts differ here: a named variation turns the waste over twice, for three passes in all, and computer versions commonly ship with something looser than one pass. Agree a number before you deal. The deal ends when the stock is exhausted and no further pair can be removed. Since a card buried in the waste is gone for the rest of the deal under those rules, the order in which you spend stock cards matters more than anything else you do.

Goal & scoring

What counts as a win is not agreed, and the two readings are far apart. On the looser one — which is what this entry assumes — you win by dismantling the pyramid: all 28 cards removed, with anything left in the stock or waste ignored, so clearing the last pyramid card wins immediately. On the stricter one every card in the pack has to go, stock and waste included. Settle which before you deal, because almost every deal that satisfies the first fails the second.

The traditional game keeps no score beyond won or lost. At the strictest reading a clear comes up about once in fifty deals, and a great many deals are unwinnable no matter how well you play, so judging yourself on wins per session is fairer than judging a single deal.

If you want a score, the usual convention is a penalty of one point per card left in the pyramid, tallied over several deals with the lowest total best. Computer versions often add time bonuses and streak bonuses on top, which is a house scoring layer rather than part of the game.

Variants

Par Pyramid, or three passes — After the stock runs out, turn the waste over without shuffling to make a new stock and go again. Two redeals, for three passes in total, is the usual relaxed setting and travels under the name Par Pyramid. It rescues cards buried early in the first pass and raises the win rate substantially.

Draw three — Turn stock cards three at a time instead of one, with only the top of each triple available, and allow unlimited redeals to compensate. Sold as King Tut or Tut's Tomb in various solitaire collections. Buried cards become reachable eventually, but you have far less control over which card is showing at any given moment.

Giza — An open variant by Michael Keller. The pyramid is dealt as usual, but the 24 leftover cards go face up into eight piles of three instead of a face-down stock, with the top card of each pile available. Nothing is hidden and there is no drawing, so the deal is a pure planning puzzle that you either solve or do not.

Apophis — Deal the standard 28-card pyramid, then run the stock into three separate waste piles instead of one, choosing which pile each turned card goes on. The top card of all three piles is available at once, which gives you three live cards to work with and much better control over what you keep in reach.

A reserve row — Deal seven more cards in a row below the pyramid, not overlapping it, once the pyramid is built. They are available from the start and stay available all game, which gives you seven live cards to pair against instead of only the bottom row and the waste. Some accounts deal six rather than seven. It makes a markedly easier game and is common enough that a reader meeting Pyramid somewhere else may find it assumed.

Pairing a card with the one it covers — Ordinarily a covered card is dead until both cards below it are gone. Some versions let a card be removed together with a card it is resting on, provided nothing else covers either of them — so an exposed ace lying on a queen takes the queen with it, but not if a jack is also sitting on that queen. Others require both cards to be uncovered before either can be used, which is the rule this entry describes.

Clear everything — The stricter of the two winning conditions, treated here as a variant because the entry describes the looser one: you must remove all 52 cards, stock and waste included, rather than just the pyramid. One account gives this as the definition of a win and calls the pyramid-only version Relaxed Pyramid, so which of the two is the variant depends on whom you ask. Very few deals can be beaten this way.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• counting
• luck
• quick
• solo
• strategy

Rules checked against Wikipedia, GameRules.com, Solitaire Central Rulebook, Wikibooks Solitaire card games, BVS Solitaire, Bicycle Cards, PlayingCardDecks.

Red Dog

Also known as Yablon, Acey-Deucey, In-Between

Players

2-8 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 to 8 standard decks shuffled together; six is the casino norm, and more packs is better for the player rather than worse

Time

15-30 minutes

Difficulty

Simple

Category

Casino

Setup

Red Dog is banked. One person deals and covers every bet, and the players are not competing with one another at all — in a casino the bank is the house, and at a kitchen table it should be somebody with enough chips to pay out and a willingness to hand the job on, because the bank holds the edge and nobody should keep it all evening.

The name is shared, and the older claim is the stronger one. For most of the twentieth century Red Dog meant a five-card banking game in which you bet that you held something higher in whatever suit the dealer turned; card books still print that game under this name, and under High Card Pool, Slippery Sam and Shoot. What follows is what a modern casino means by Red Dog, which also answers to Yablon, Acey-Deucey and In-Between.

Shuffle between one and eight packs together. Six dealt from a shoe is the usual casino arrangement, and the deck count runs the opposite way to most games: extra packs help the player, trimming the bank's share from about 3.16 percent on a single deck to about 2.75 percent on eight. Playing with one pack at home is fine as long as everything goes back in and gets shuffled after each hand.

Ranks are poker ranks and the ace is always high, so the order stops dead at both ends and nothing wraps — king up to two is a shorter distance than ace down to two. Suits are ignored from start to finish.

Agree a minimum and a maximum stake before the first deal, give everyone chips, and mark out a betting spot in front of each seat.

Play

A single hand is dealt for the whole table. Everyone is betting on the same three cards, and the only private decision anyone makes is whether to raise.

Stakes go down first. The banker then turns two cards face up with a space left between them. Nearly always those two cards have room between them, and that is the hand the game is built around: the banker calls the spread, meaning the number of ranks lying strictly in the gap. A 3 alongside a 9 leaves the 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, so that is a spread of 5. Eleven is as wide as the gap ever gets, which takes an ace at one end and a two at the other.

A spread is the only thing that gives anyone a decision. Each player may raise, adding up to as much again as their original stake and no more, or may leave the first bet standing and add nothing. The choice is individual — nobody has to match the seat beside them.

The third card then goes into the gap. A rank strictly inside the two ends wins, and the raise is paid at the same odds as the stake it was added to. A card matching either end, or falling outside the pair of them altogether, loses everything put out, raise included. Landing on an end card is a plain loss rather than a returned stake, which is the first difference to look for if you have played the pot version described below.

Two openings never reach any of that:

• The two cards are neighbours, a 6 beside a 7. Nothing can come between them, so the hand is dead where it stands and every stake goes back.
• The two cards are a pair. The third card is turned at once with no raise offered, and only a third card of the same rank does anything: it pays 11 to 1, and any other card returns the stakes untouched.

The three cards are then cleared away and the next hand dealt. A casino buries a cut card in the shoe and reshuffles at the end of whichever round turns it up; at home, shuffle the discards back in whenever the pack runs low.

Goal & scoring

You are betting that a third card will fall between two you can already see. Nothing else is scored, and one player's result has no bearing on anyone else's.

What a hit pays is decided by the spread alone, and the two pull against each other: a narrow gap is hard to fill and pays heavily, while a wide one comes in more often than not and pays even money for it.

The raise is the whole of the strategy, and it has one correct answer. A spread of 7 or more fills more often than it fails, so money added there is money on the right side of the bet; at 6 or less the odds are against you and the extra stake should stay in front of you. That dividing line holds whatever the number of decks — raise on 7 and above, never below, and there is nothing else in the game to learn.

Across a session the bank keeps somewhere between about 3.16 percent of everything wagered at a single deck and about 2.75 percent at eight, so the deepest shoe on offer is the one to sit at. There is no target and no finish: play as many hands as suit you and count the chips at the end.

Variants

In-Between, played for a pot — The home version, and the one that predates the casino table. There is a pot rather than a fixed scale of odds, and it is filled one of two ways: most usually the dealer alone stakes it and plays against each of the others in turn, or else everybody antes in equally. Each player is given two cards face up and bets anything from nothing up to whatever the pot holds at that moment. Fill the gap and you take that much out of it; miss and you pay that much in. Landing exactly on an end card is a post and costs double the bet, which is what the fixed casino payouts are built to replace. Where the first card is an ace its owner calls it high or low; an ace turned second is always high, and posting on an ace costs four times the bet. A pair for the two ends is played as a simple higher-or-lower guess, with a third card of the same rank costing treble. There are no spread odds at all — every win pays what was staked, so the judgement is how much of the pot to chase rather than whether to raise.

High Card Pool — The older game that the name belonged to first, still worth knowing because half the card books mean this one. Everyone antes, the dealer gives each player five cards, and in turn you bet anything from the ante up to the whole pot before the dealer turns a card face up in front of you. Show a card of that suit and higher in rank and you take your stake back plus the same again from the pot; fail and the pot takes your bet. Deal passes after everyone has bet, and the pot carries over. Slippery Sam and Shoot are the same wager with three cards each and the dealer putting up a bank instead of everyone anteing.

Splitting a pair — Played in some pot games in place of the flat 11 to 1. When the two end cards match, the bettor antes for a second hand and the dealer draws one further card beside each of them, making two ordinary spreads out of what would otherwise have been a one-card shot. Everything then proceeds as normal on both. It turns the rarest and swingiest hand in the game into two average ones, which suits a table that would rather keep the pot moving than watch it be won or emptied on a single card.

• beginner-friendly
• betting
• luck
• quick

Rules checked against Wikipedia, Pagat, Wizard of Odds.

Rummy

Also known as Rum, Straight Rummy, Basic Rummy

Players

2-6 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards)

Time

20-45 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Rummy family

Setup

Use one 52-card pack with the jokers removed. Any fair method picks the first dealer; drawing cards and giving the deal to the highest is common, with tied drawers drawing again. The deal then passes to the left after each hand, which means it simply alternates in the two-player game.

How many cards you get depends on the size of the table. With two players, deal 10 each. With three or four, deal 7 each. With five or six, deal 6 each. Deal one card at a time, face down and clockwise, beginning on the dealer's left.

What is left becomes the stock, face down in the middle, with a single card turned beside it to open the discard pile. Only the top card of that pile is ever available, so keep it squared up rather than spread.

Aces are low. A-2-3 is a run and Q-K-A is not, unless you agree otherwise before the first deal. For scoring, an ace is 1 point, each numbered card is worth its number, and a jack, queen or king is 10. The player to the dealer's left takes the first turn.

Play

You are trying to get rid of every card in your hand by arranging them into melds. A set is a rank collected up: three nines, or all four of them. A run is three or more cards of one suit in sequence, such as 5♠ 6♠ 7♠. A card can only belong to one meld at a time.

A turn has three parts and always happens in this order.

First, draw. Take either the top card of the stock, sight unseen, or the top card of the discard pile, which everyone can see. You draw exactly one card, and you may not dig deeper into the discard pile.

Second, meld if you want to. Lay any complete set or run from your hand face up in front of you. You may also lay off: add a card to any meld already on the table, yours or an opponent's, by putting a fourth card on a set or extending either end of a run. Laying off is how single cards get used up late in a hand; the card you add simply becomes part of that meld, and since melds score nothing for anybody in the basic game it does not matter whose spread it joined. Melding is always optional, even when you can. Holding a completed meld back keeps your options open but risks getting caught with it.

Third, discard. Put one card face up on the discard pile. That ends your turn and passes play to the left. The one thing you cannot do is take the top discard and immediately throw the same card back.

Two points worth agreeing before you deal, because tables differ and the accounts of the game differ with them. One meld a turn is the older rule and the one still written down as standard, though plenty of groups let you lay down as many as you like. Laying off runs the other way: some accounts let you add to anybody's melds from the start, and others hold you back until you have laid down a meld of your own.

The hand ends when somebody goes out, which means playing their last card. You can go out by melding, by laying off, or by discarding your final card, and any mix of those in one turn. In the basic game you do not need to keep a card back for a final discard, though a good number of households insist on it.

If nobody has gone out by the time the stock is empty, take the discard pile, leave its top card where it is as the only card of a new discard pile, and turn the rest face down as a fresh stock. Shuffling that new stock first is common and harmless. The player who found the stock empty draws from the new one and finishes their turn as normal, and play continues to the left. A stubborn hand can in principle circle for ever, so cap it before you start: ending after the stock has run out for the third time, or allowing the discard pile just one reuse, are both suggested. When the cap is reached the hand ends and the cards are scored as they stand.

Going out in a single turn, with no previous melds or lay-offs at all, is going rummy and pays double. To do it you must put your entire hand down on one turn, having laid nothing on the table earlier in the deal.

Goal & scoring

The object of each hand is to be first to shed every card. Play runs to an agreed target, over as many hands as that takes. No figure is standard, so pick one before the first shuffle — or agree a fixed number of deals instead, which works just as well.

When a player goes out, everyone else counts the cards still in their hand. Melds already on the table do not count for or against anybody, and neither do cards you laid off. Aces are 1, numbered cards are face value, and jacks, queens and kings are 10 each. The winner of the hand scores the sum of everything all the other players are left holding.

Going rummy doubles the whole amount collected for that hand.

The common alternative is penalty scoring: instead of the winner collecting, each losing player writes down the value of their own leftover cards as a plus score, the winner writes zero, and the game runs until someone crosses an agreed limit, at which point the lowest total wins.

Ties are settled the same way under either method: if two or more players are level for the win once the target has been passed, deal again and keep playing until one of them is clear on their own.

Variants

Block Rummy — The discard pile is never recycled. Once the stock is gone, the hand stops the moment somebody declines the top discard, and nobody goes out. Everyone counts the cards in their hand as penalty points, including the player who would otherwise have won. It makes hoarding a big hand far more dangerous and speeds the game up noticeably.

Boathouse Rum — A sharper two-player version. If you take the top discard you must then draw a second card, either the next discard or the top of the stock, but you still discard only one, so your hand grows. An ace may be used high or low, but not both ends at once, and it costs 11 points if you are caught holding it. You may not meld or lay off at all until the turn on which you go out, so every hand is played entirely from concealment.

Knock Rummy — Also called Poker Rum. Nothing is laid on the table during play. Instead, any player may end the hand on their turn by discarding face down and knocking, then spreading their hand. Everyone reveals, counts their unmelded cards, and the lowest count wins the difference from each of the others. A knocker who turns out not to be lowest usually pays a flat 10-point penalty to the player who is, on top of the differences, and a tie for lowest is normally judged against the knocker. Many tables also pay the knocker an agreed bonus, commonly 25, for knocking with a count of zero. The bluff is in deciding how early you dare to stop the hand.

Wild cards — Add one or two jokers, or nominate a rank such as deuces, as wild cards that can stand in for anything in a meld. A common accompanying rule lets a later player swap the natural card for a wild one sitting in a meld on the table and take the wild card into hand. Wilds usually carry a heavy penalty value, often 15 or 20 points, if you are caught holding one at the end of a hand.

• beginner-friendly
• classic
• counting
• family-friendly
• luck
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, Official Game Rules, Denexa Games.

Schieber Jass

Also known as Schieber, Chibre

Players

4 players

Deck

1 standard deck stripped to 36 cards (A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 in each suit)

Time

45-90 minutes

Difficulty

Complex

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Jass is a whole family of Swiss games rather than one game, and Schieber is the branch of it most tables mean when they sit down without saying which. Four players in fixed partnerships, partners opposite each other. The name comes from schieben, to push: the one decision each hand turns on can be pushed across the table to your partner, who then has to make it.

The pack is thirty-six cards, an ordinary deck with everything below the six taken out. Swiss packs come in two designs and the country is split down the middle over them — Swiss-German suits of roses, bells, acorns and shields in the east and centre, French suits in the west and south — but the game is the same and any 36-card pack plays it. Swiss cards call the queen an Ober, the jack an Under and the ten a Banner, and those names turn up in the rules whichever pack is on the table.

Two rankings and two sets of card values, and none of it is negotiable:

• A plain suit runs ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, and the ten counts 10 while the jack counts 2, so its fifth-highest card is its second most valuable.
• In trumps the jack leaps to the top as the Puur, worth 20, and the nine follows it as the Nell, worth 14. The rest keep their order and their values underneath: ace 11, king 4, queen 3, ten 10, and nothing for the eight, seven and six.

That puts 62 points in the trump suit and 30 in each of the others. Add 5 for whoever takes the last trick and every deal is worth 157.

Deal and play run to the right, anticlockwise. Anybody may deal the first hand; after that the deal moves one seat right each time. Who gets the first hand's choice of contract is a table custom rather than a rule — cut for it, or hand it to whoever is dealt a nominated seven — and from the second hand on it is simply the seat to the dealer's right. Deal all thirty-six cards out in packets of three, starting with the player on the dealer's right, so everyone holds nine and nothing is left over.

Score on a slate if you have one, which is how it is done in Switzerland — a Z drawn on it, hundreds along the top, fifties on the diagonal, twenties along the bottom. A sheet of paper loses nothing but the atmosphere.

Play

Choosing the game. Forehand — the player to the dealer's right — either names what is played or pushes the choice to their partner, who must then name it. Nobody bids and nothing is contested: the choice is a privilege attached to a seat, and it moves one seat right each deal. What may be named:

• Any of the four suits as trumps.
• Obenabe, no trumps and every suit ranking downward from the ace.
• Undenufe, no trumps and every suit ranking upward from the six, so the six is the best card in it and the ace the worst. Most tables now move the 11 points across with it, making the six worth 11 and the ace nothing, and some of those let four sixes stand as a Weis in place of four aces. Older Swiss practice, and the Vorarlberg and South Tyrol forms, leave the values where they are; ask.

With no trump suit there is no Puur and no Nell, so 32 points go missing. The four eights make them up, counting 8 each instead of nothing, and the deal is worth 157 again.

Whatever you chose then sets a factor, and every point your side collects that deal is multiplied by it — the Weis and the Stöck exactly as much as the card points. The table has the figures. Two of the four suits are worth double, which is what makes choosing a live decision rather than a formality. On a Swiss pack those two are shields and bells; on a French pack the usual convention hands the doubling to the two black suits, but the sources genuinely disagree about it, so settle which two before the first deal.

The tricks. Forehand leads to the first one; from then on the lead belongs to whoever took the last. The following rule is the one that marks these games out from the whist family, and it is worth reading twice: holding the suit led, you may either follow it or play a trump, as you please. There is never any obligation to follow a plain suit when a trump would suit you better.

What is forbidden instead is undertrumping. Once somebody has trumped a plain suit, nobody after them may drop a smaller trump onto it to be rid of the card. If you can follow the suit led, your choice narrows to following it or beating that trump; if you cannot follow, you may play anything at all except a trump that fails to beat it. A player holding nothing but trumps is released from all of that and may play any of them.

Two more:

• When trumps are led you must play one if you have one, with a single exception, and it is a valuable one: if the Puur is the only trump left in your hand, you may hold on to it and play anything else instead.
• The trick belongs to the highest trump on it, and where no trump was played, to whoever went highest in the suit that opened.

Nine tricks empty the hands. Taking all nine is a match and pays 100 above the 157, before the multiplier.

Weis. Combinations held at the start of play score, and only one side collects them. A run of three or more cards in one suit counts, and so does four of a kind in ace, king, queen or ten, with four jacks the best thing in the game at 200. The trap is that Weis are read in the ordinary suit order, ace down to six, which has nothing to do with the trick-taking order — the Puur, the Nell and the ace of trumps are the three best cards you can hold and they are not a run.

The collecting is settled over the first trick. As each player plays their card they may name the value of their best Weis; whoever is beaten says so, and where two claims are level the players compare length, then top card, then trump, then seating order, giving away as little as they can while they do it. The side owning the best single Weis scores every Weis on that side, and the other side scores none of its own however good they were. Anybody may ask to see a scored Weis before the second trick.

Stöck sits outside all of that. Hold the king and queen of trumps and you say stöck as you play the second of them, for 20, and it cannot be beaten or cancelled by anybody's Weis.