Help me identify this card game and finish the rules

Cafe Society
1

Alright folks, 2007 has been a shitty year for my family. My dad’s remaining best friend passed away tonight and we’re trying to retain a card game that he taught us. The name we know is “Oh shit.”

Goal: Get rid of all the cards

Deal: Each player is dealt 3 cards, face down, no one looks at these. Then you deal everyone three up which are placed with one on top of each of their face down card. After that three are dealt for each player’s hand.

Play begins with the person who has a 3, first person to speak up could play it. If no 3s then 4s etc.

The next player had to play a card higher than or equal to what was showing on the stack. If you could not, then you had to pick up the stack.

While you have cards in hand, the cards on the table remain untouched until no cards remain in your hand.

Special rules:
4 of a kind retires a pile and allows the player to play again.

10s retire the pile and allow the player to play again
2s reset the count but do not retire the pile.

Any ideas folks?
– IG

2

I can’t help you directly.

That should help you.

3

I played a game like this almost every day of my last semester of high school. We used 5 or 7 cards for hands, though, to make it go a bit faster. We always called it Idiot.

I did a bit of searching (not least of all because I can never remember whether or not I remember all the rules), and found plenty of results. (I Googled “idiot card game” without quotation marks.)

The most concise explanation is probably on Wikipedia, which seems to think it has a rather more vulgar name, S—head, and says that calling it Idiot is a UK variation.

I’m not sure if they’re right about that last point. If it’s only a UK name, then I can’t figure out how my group of friends got the name for it- I was the only one playing the game who’d been to the UK, but I had to be taught the game in the US.

(This is my first post, by the way. I finally got up the courage to de-lurk!)