Help Me Identify This Card Game

The Game Room
1

This is a card game I played when I was in high school in Georgia. I’ve never met anyone outside of school who knew how to play this game, and I was hoping someone could tell me if it might be known with a different name.

The game was called “Hail” and was played with 3 or 4 players. You would start by dealing all the cards evenly among the players. The object of the game is to get rid of all your cards. The value of the cards start with the lowest being 3, then 4,5,6,7,8,9,10,J,Q,K,A and 2 is the highest value card. The suits are also ranked, starting low to high they are clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts.

The person with the 3 of clubs would start the game. When making a move, you could play a single card, pairs, three, or four of a kind, or you could also play a straight, or a suited straight. After making your play, everyone has to follow the same type going up in value until no one else can or will play. The last person who plays gets to start the next round.

So for example, if I started play by playing 3 of clubs, 4 of clubs, and 5 of clubs, I would say suited straight, and then everyone else after me has to play at least a 3, 4, or 5 of spades or a suited straight of higher numbers. It works the same way for pairs, three of a kind, etc.

If a straight is played without being suited, the suit of the highest card in the straight determines the value.

A two is the highest card, and usually is not beaten, but there is one exception. If a player has 3 sequential pairs, they can say cop-killer, and play the six cards on top of someone else’s two, and win the round and play first on the next round.

You keep playing until someone runs out of cards, that person is the winner. The basic strategy of the game is in playing the right pairs or straights at the right time to continue playing first.

I think this is a pretty thorough explanation of the rules, and I imagine if you know the game, you figured it out before finishing the post.

Thanks for reading all this, and hopefully you recognize this game!

2

It’s Asshole with a bunch of extra rules.

3

If it’s Tuesday, it’s Fizzbin. :smiley:

With a username like that, what did you expect?

4

Looks mostly like an asshole variant*, though you don’t mention the key rule of asshole, which is card-swapping (the winner gives the loser his 2 lowest cards and receives the loser’s 2 highest…the second and second-last swap one card).

  • The game evolves pretty quick, even in the same location - I never played with straights, but whether pairs or higher were allowed, and whether you could beat a pair with a single, or needed to play a pair or higher changed from group to group. The suit rank was always the same (and different than what you list), though. This ‘cop-killer’ wasn’t how to beat a 2, either - we used Jokers as the beat-all. Playing 3 pairs at once seems rather unbalanced.
5

I played this once without the “cop killer” rule. I learned it from a family on a cruise ship when I was a teenager and we played for nickels. They called it “dai-ii” (I have no idea how to spell it, pronounced dye-ee) and said it was a Chinese poker variant. They had a betting system where basically the last place player had to pay everyone, and the second to last place had to pay everyone but the last place, and so forth, so things got exponentially better or worse depending on how well you did. I won pretty big and got a big bag of nickels for my troubles.

6

Probably Big Two, which, if I’m reading the transliteration right, would, in Cantonese, be pronounced very roughly cho die dee, and does sound closer to what the OP describes than Asshole. … However, surfing from there, I see the Vietnamese game Tien Len, which matches even better.

7

Sounds a lot like a game we play called Presidents.

8

This is it, without question! I played this same game in high school, taught to me by a 1st generation Vietnamese American. We called the game “VC” or “Viet Cong,” which much makes no sense… but anyway, that’s the game.

9

We also played with a few different rule variants:

-Usually suited straights were not treated differently (456 all spades can be beat by 4 of diamonds, 5 of clubs, 6 of hearts)
-“Two breakers” (“cop killers” to OP) could be three consecutive pairs, but you could also “break” a two-breaker by playing a better three consecutive pairs.
-Four of a kind was also a two-breaker, and could break any two-breaker consisting of consecutive pairs.

10

Tichu is a really fun game for partnerships that is clearly very similar, very much worth buying (or ginning up your own 56-card deck).

It is very similar to what I learned as Feudal Wars, particularly with 2’s being high, but we played without straights of any sort, and without suit order of any sort.

11

Awesome! Thanks for the help everyone.

12

My experience matches up fairly well with the wiki articles people have already linked to.

I learned the game, minus the “cop killer” rule, from Chinese high school students in San Francisco. They referred to it as Deuces, and I was told it’s often played as a gambling game, with the losing players paying the winner a certain amount for each card they have left in their hands. This changes the strategy somewhat, as it’s more important to get rid of cards if your hand isn’t really strong.

I also learned a different version from one of my cousins from New England. He called it Thirteen and it had your “cop killer” rule, but known as a “double run”. Also, diamonds were the low suit, followed by clubs, spades, and then hearts.

13

Ah yes, I remember the betting system now.

Say Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave finish with 0, 1, 4, and 6 cards respectively. Each loser pays everyone above them equal to the difference in cards in hand. So Dave pays Alice 6 chips, Bob 5, and Carol 2. Carol pays Alice 4 and Bob 3. Bob pays Alice 1.

14

I thought I have played (or at least heard) of every card game played in North America. I have never heard of this game.

15

They only play it at Mensa conferences, that’s why.

16

Whenever I’ve seen Asshole played, it’s been in combination with alcohol, and with drinking rules added (for the winner or the loser, I can’t remember).

17

My friends and I play this game a lot, although it was taught to me under the name “Poison”. It’s basically the same game with a few differences. Suits (from low to high) are spades, clubs, diamonds, hearts. We call your cop-killers “poisons”. And a four of a kind beats cop-killers/poisons or anything else laid.

Awhile back I saw some Filipino friends playing this, but with slight variation. They called is “Pusoi Dos” and said it was from the Phillippines.

18

That there is what we’d call Pasoi, more or less.

We’d only play with singles, pairs, threes and 5 card hands.

Five card hands included straights, flushes, and four of a kind with a “trash card.”

None of that cop killer crap.

Diamonds beat hearts which beat spades which beat clubs.

I LOVED that game.

You can also bet money on it. Like a nickle a card so the losers end up giving you a nickle for each extra card they have. We never bet any money though.