When I was a senior in high school, my dad wanted to teach me how to play bridge. His reasoning was that it was an important social skill to have in college – he had gone to the same college (Wisconsin) which I’d be attending, and playing bridge was somethng that was very common when he was there. I really had no interest in bridge, and no one my age played it, so I didn’t take him up on his offer.
Once I got to college, what I discovered was that my dad’s experience around bridge, and the importance that he placed on it as a social skill, was undoubtedly a function of the fact that he’d gone to school in the mid 1950s. I rarely saw anyone playing bridge when I was at the UW, but I did play a lot of D&D, and made some great friends playing that game. 
I was in college at Northwestern U. from 1994-1998. I only knew one group of four that played Bridge. And they were the only people I knew of that knew how.
Euchre was very common there, which makes sense with a school that gets a lot of Cheeseheads and Michiganders. (I originally hailed from Wisconsin myself.)
While whist isn’t popular here, as far as I know, bid whist is popular in the African-American community. It’s a fun game if you like partnership trick taking games with a bit more variety and skill than spades.
Oh, hello! I was at NU 93-98. My group played more spades and hearts, but I remember euchre in the mix, too. I don’t remember bridge, either. You’d think it have some traction there, but no. I’m sure there must have been a club or something, but I don’t remember actually seeing it played.
Spades requires a decent amount of thinking if you add things that keep people honest.
-
Play with a sandbag count. This forces the team in the lead to still bid properly rather than underbid everything when they’re in a safe position. Every cumulative 10 sandbags (i.e. tricks that you get that exceed your bid) will lose you 100 points. Which means while 9 sandbags adds a measly 9 points to your score, getting 10 means you effectively lose 90 points.
-
Play for stakes. This prevents the team that’s losing from recklessly bidding Blind Nil/Double Nil just because they’re losing. A 200 point loss is nothing to sneeze at if each point is worth something.
-
Allow Blind Nil/Double Nil at any time. It’s a strategic move, not a desperation ploy. (I’ve seen some online games that only allow it if the losing team is 200 points or more down. It’s like they’re trying to encourage Spades to become a game of only luck.) It also puts pressure on the other team, particularly seat 3, to sometime underbid just to prevent the dealer from going double nil. (Generally the dealer is the only one who stands a chance to bid double nil. Occasionally seat 3 will do it, but that requires seat 1 to have bid exceptionally high and seat 2 to also have a really good hand.)
I’ve always thought “euchre” sounded like an archaic medical term from the 1800s describing some kind of weeping skin infection. Like lumbago, but far more serious, disgusting, or both.
Hi Doc; my euchre’s been acting up again.
Here Bob; use this liniment twice a day and let me know if it doesn’t improve.
The card game, of which I know nothing, may be a perfectly wonderful game of skill and luck. The name makes me think of an infected sinus or carbuncle.
The game derives from an Alsatian game in the 1800’s called “Juckerspiel”, where “Jucker” meant “Jack”. In that game, as in Euchre, the Jacks are the top trump. It’s likely that this term is also what gave rise to the name of the card we know as the Joker. In the 1860’s, the Joker was added to American Euchre to act as the top trump, a glorified Jack. It eventually made it’s way into other games, generally as a wild card, but it originally had a specific purpose in Euchre as the top “bauer” (AKA “bower” in English) which is a German word meaning “farmer” and is what the Jacks of trump are called in Euchre.
I think I only played with a Joker once in my entire time of playing Euchre. It seems most circles prefer the two-bower variant, which is the original version.
But it was Euchre that gave us the Joker card.
Interesting. I had just assumed it came from the Fool card (also known as the *l’excuse’ or Sküs) from tarot/tarock decks (for those that don’t know, tarot is a card game, or a variety of card games, not just divination.) But Wikipedia does agree that euchre is the origin of Joker, and that the assumption that it came from the Fool in tarot is incorrect. Interesting.
When I lived in Mannheim, Germany, there were plenty of folks in my circle who played Tarot games, but very few of the Americans would because they seemed to only connect the Tarot cards to fortune-telling.
They’re fun! I played a bit of tapp tarock in Slovenia, using an Austrian deck – and this was a huge oversized deck. It was silly! I was a bit disappointed as I threw away my original deck last year, since it was missing cards and basically useless, but I ended up mail ordering a new deck a few weeks ago, thinking it would be that giant over-sized deck, and I got a deck that was approximately bridge-sized. Much more sensible, but I liked those silly giant cards!
Hoyle Card Games in the early 2000s had tarot as one of the games you can play. I think it was French tarot with a standard 78 card deck. Tapp tarock uses a 54 card deck. And it’s a bit funky, because you have four court cards for each suit (the addition of a knight), and the pip cards only have 1,2,3,4 in the red suits and 10, 9, 8, 7 in the black suits. And the red pip cards rank in reverse, with the 4 as the lowest instead of the 1. It’s quirky.
I’m in my 50s and I’ve never encountered a real person who ever mentioned playing canasta. I knew it was a card game but until this thread I didn’t know that there were special decks for it. I have some impression of its being popular among textured people in sitcoms.
Euchre was popular when I was in college. I hadn’t heard of it before starting college but played it a lot during first year. In my mind it was always connected to Bob Uecker. It was a long time later that I saw “euchre” written down.
This might be part of the reason canasta is not more popular. I learned to play when I was pretty young, then didn’t play for a while, and had to relearn. Other card games are much simpler, and you don’t forget, even if you don’t play for several years. Canasta has, IIRC, a lot more details than other games.
My 14-yr-old asked me why “bridge mix” is called that. I told him, and he asked me what “bridge” was. I replied that it was a card game.
“Like poker?”
“More like Euchre. You play in two pairs.”
He was born in Indiana. He knows what Euchre is. BTW, my spellcheck is making me capitalize Euchre. It gets the red underline if I spell it with a small “e.” Doesn’t happen with other games-- although, I guess, the other games’ names are words in their own right.
I feel like one can tell people’s fortunes using a canasta deck instead, but I cannot be held responsible for what happens to them afterwards.
I talked to my mother and apparently my parents play canasta every night.
I learned to play in Vietnam out of sheer boredom. We started out playing hearts and then spades. When we got bored with that, someone taught us all how to play canasta. That kept us entertained for quite a long time. Finally, a guy from Indiana asked if anybody had heard of Euchre. Nope. So he taught us the game. A few years later I got hooked on double-deck pinochle; had some all-nighters/all weekenders playing that.