Hand and Foot is a game that a roommate in college told me about; but, I didn’t learn to play it until about 15 years later.
Sheepshead
Barbu (sp?)
Forgot one: Nines
Was one of the obscure rules something about saying “Mamma needs a new pair of shoes”? I’m wracking my brain now, too, trying to remember what that was called. It’s difficult to find a good group for it: You need a couple of people who know (and thus can enforce) the rules, and more than that who don’t. Drunkenness seemed to help, too.
I was going to mention Egyptian Rat Screw, but cckerberos beat me to it. Our version was “slap on jokers and pairs”. We also had a house rule of “No weapons in the first round”.
There are, of course, many things vaguely resembling poker that could be mentioned here. In one that I’ve found somewhat fun (I think it was called “Liars’ Poker”), each player has a hand of four cards, and you go around the table bidding on the highest poker hand to be found among all of the hands together. So, for instance, if I had the 2, 3, and 7 of clubs in my hand, I might start the bidding with “Flush in clubs, seven high”. The next player might then conclude that I probably have a few clubs, so a flush is a safe bet, and raise to “Flush in clubs, jack high”, if he was holding the jack. At any time, a player can challenge the previous player instead of raising, at which point the cards are laid down, and everyone sees whether the claimed hand is present. The loser of the challenge then plays the next round with one less card (and therefore less information) than the other players. Play continues until someone runs out of cards.
Another one is “Indian Poker”, where each player has a single card, stuck face-out to their foreheads. So each player can see everyone else’s cards, but not es own. Players then make and raise bets on who has the highest card.
And I’m very surprised that Casino was listed as a common game. Everyone in my extended family plays it, but I’ve only ever once met someone outside the family who had heard of it, and she used very different rules.
Anyone play President? It has an alternate name, Asshole. Contrary to what you might think, the two names actually refer to the lowest and highest ranks in the game. The game has a hierarchy of positions, where the lowest rank has to give up their highest cards to those above them at the start (and is generally otherwise abused).
One version I learned involved the lower ranks giving up [N/2-(rank above Asshole)] cards to the ascending higher ranks ( odd middle player holds). In another, the lower players’ cards are grouped together, with the President getting first pick. These sorts I found to be the best, since it means each player can usually only reasonably aspire to the role one or two above them (as opposed to one that only penalizes the lowest rank, and the social structure can change more from round to round).
Play involves getting rid of your cards, by playing a card or cards >= in rank and in number (e.g. a pair of 10s or three 6s but not just one K on a pair of 7s), and the social order changes based on who wins first.
The drinking version of the game is brutal, especially since the game involves more thought than a lot of drinking games.
There were as many rules as there were groups to form traditions around them. We learned it as ‘Mao’ [sup]*[/sup], and some of the ‘stock rules’ involved the Beatles and Snoopy.
In my experience, the only standard rules seem to be that you must get rid of all your cards to win, you receive penalties (extra cards) for failure to follow the rules, and a ‘point of order’ in which cards are laid down and freer talk is allowed.
In situations where most people didn’t know the rules, or just on long trips, it’s common to start with a very basic set of rules. Anyone who wins a round (on longer trips, three rounds) gets to create a new rule. This makes it a lot more fun for people who aren’t in on the usual rules, since they can make their own.
[sup]*[/sup]Near as I can tell, TEGWAR isn’t a game one can actually play to win - there are no rules at all. Mao, on the other hand, has rules, they just aren’t known to most of the players.
Sheepshead was a lunch pastime at a place I worked at a few years ago. And Spoons, Bullshit, and Asshole are all popular whilst drinking.
I’ve heard of people playing a card game called “screw your neighbor”, but I’ve never played it myself.
My mother taught me scat, cribbage, and this one other game… Each person is dealt 4 cards. You choose which 2 you get to look at, and the other two you play blind. The object of the game is that you draw(either from the deck or the discard pile), and exchange your cards for lower ones, and you knock when you think you have the lowest total. I think kings are worth zero, and therefore the best possible card, and it was so damn frustrating to exchange one of your blind cards only to discover you were holding a king. Is this a common game that I just don’t know the name of?
ETA: I also think there were a set number of rounds(nine, maybe), and your scores for each round were tallied at the end to determine the game winner. I’m gonna feel foolish if everyone knows the name of this game but me…
Skat is my absolute favorite card game. We learned it because there was a group of us fanatic card players who needed a skillful three-hander as we were often lacking a fourth for our usual hearts/spades/pitch/euchre games. When there were only two, we usually played cribbage or gin (or sometimes something more obscure here like Piquet), but we were stuck on good three-player games. So we went through the card book, discovered Skat (and found out it was the national card game of Germany), learned it and, within about a week of solid playing, had gotten a good grasp of the game. We got good enough to beat native Germans coming through town. It’s a fun game, with zillions of variations, and a thinking person’s game, much like bridge.
A couple more interesting ones–there’s a Hungarian three-hander called Ulti, which is the national card came of Hungary. Also, Slovenian Tarock, played with specialized cards, is quite interesting, giving all the different possible hands and ways you could play them (the possible contracts give you all sorts of options.)
Growing up, the game around the house was Tysiac (One Thousand), an Eastern-European three-handed point-trick-taking game involving marriages (similar, in a way, to pinochle, I suppose). It’s a fun game when you start playing it, but after a few dozen hands–if you’re used to point-trick taking games–it becomes rather automatic. At least to me it does.
Ohhhh, so there’s the scat that I know(31), and then there’s skat, which I just googled thanks to this thread. Never heard of it until now. Learn something new every day, I guess!
A dice game we have had lots of fun with, especially when there’s a group of more than four wanting to play something, is 10,000 (Ten Thousand) which this link describes well enough to play, although we have used the 5-dice version almost exclusively. The 6-dice version moves faster.
Nines is also a three handed trump and no-trump game you might check out; rules are on wikipedia; i’ve never played skat but it sounds a lot more complicated.
9 card Don.
Nap
Used to be played in UK pubs a lot, now not so much.
We loved to play Bullshit/I Doubt It. Also there was another game, a really fast speed game called Spit. Does anyone else remember that?
I wish I knew where to find the rules for these.
May not be the one you remember, but Wikipedia has this article on Spit and the same source I mentioned above for Tonk and Bourre’ also has one for Spit/Speed, along with many other games.
Thank you. I just found this place.
Skat is pretty complicated and best learned by playing other skat players who will show you the ropes. That said, it is possible to learn how to play correctly just from the card rules, but it does have a few somewhat complicated rules about scoring. Actually, now that I think of it, Hoyle’s later editions of their card game software contains skat–that’s a good way to learn. The hardest thing to learn in the beginning is the valuation of your hand, i.e. which hands to play and what contracts to make. I think we played for almost 8 hours before we started figuring it out and getting positive scores.
Yes! That’s it. Thank you, it’s been bothering me for many years now.
We used to love playing 10,000 at family get-togethers. It’s really fun to see how greedy upir family truly is (or to see if you can goad them into being more greedy than they really are)!
Another game I haven’t seen mentioned is Pusoy Dos. Apparently, it’s a variation of a game I haven’t heard of (Big 2), but it’s a card shedding game based off of poker hands. Totally fun, especially if you get enough people to run the game with two decks of cards.
Of some of the more obscure games already mentioned, Barbu and Oh Hell have been frequent favorites of mine in the past, and in college also played TEGWAR or something very much like it, with the same eventual result (when everybody knew all the rules it ceased to be very interesting). Though the only rule I can even remotely remember now is having to take a card for “failing to name your Beatle”, being that one had to name one of the Beatles (John/Paul/George/Ringo) under certain circumstances.
For those unfamiliar with Barbu, it’s a game-of-games for four people where there are 7 (or 8 if an optional “Ravage” sub-game is included) rounds played, with 7 (or 8) sub-games available, each called once by each person on their deal. Since this means playing exactly 28 or 32 hands to complete the game (and scoring can be tricky), it can take upwards of 4 hours to finish depending on the intensity and skill level of the players. To speed things along I developed an abbreviated version of the game called Barbette that finishes in 16 deals, while preserving the most interesting/unique aspects of the “regular” game.
In high school we used to play a somewhat unusual (but apparently standard) variant of Hearts for a large group, Double Deck Cancellation Omnibus Hearts. For 6-10 players, we would shuffle two complete decks together and play hearts as normal, but any two identical cards in a trick would “cancel” for purposes of winning the trick. So in a 7 person game one might lead the 2 of hearts, and see it go Ace of Hearts, Queen of Spades, Queen of Spades, Ace of Hearts, and two Kings of Hearts – in which case all the higher hearts “cancelled out”, leaving the leading card of the 2 as the winning heart in a trick containing 30 points (ouch).
The “Omnibus” variant referred to also including the Jack of Diamonds as a negative scoring card (-10 points) just to increase the randomness. And shooting the moon, should one be able to do it in a double deck variant, was worth 52/-52.
We did try a triple deck version once but it got kind of hard to shuffle.
The Chinese game of Zheng Shangyou was always one of my favourites, but I haven’t had the opportunity to play for some years now.
This sounds very similar to my favorite card game, Tichu: English Tichu Rules
It is played a lot by Germans at www.brettspielwelt.de. The game is always a partnership game, and uses a standard deck of 52 cards plus four special cards. The strategies behind passing cards, when to call Tichu, and when and what to play keep the game consistently fresh for the many years I’ve been playing.