Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Learnt around 27 years ago now, taught by my Mother.
Family played it on rainy days and on holidays in the caravan.
No-one else I know has ever heard of it, much less knows the rules.
I learned Euchre about 12 years ago when I was a counselor on a teeeny little island in the St. Mary’s River in the UP. I also played more recently with a couple I know while on a ski weekend - he’s from Ohio, she’s from Wisconsin and they met in Chicago. No one else we were with had ever heard of it, but we got 'em indoctriated. 
Twiddle
As the link suggests, Milwaukee, WI. 
Former Michigander - learned how from my dad when I was seven. Now I’m a Hoosier and they play some wicked Euchre here. My In-laws are all SE Ontario, and they play as well - including a six-handed double-Euchre deck version. (I don’t remember if it’s three teams or three persons to a team. I think it’s 3 teams.) And I always thought Manitoba was the Canadian MidWest, so yeah, you’re part of the MW if you want to be, I suppose. 
That’s for sure. I grew up in Akron and not only did my folks go to/throw semi-regular euchre tourneys, I spent essentially every lunch hour of my senior year at the game. According to my dad, at Akron U. in the 60’s and 70’s all day long in the student center you could find groups of white kids playing euchre and black kids playing whist. My sister demanded to be taught the game when she was about seven years old and consistently beat the pants off the rest of us.
–Cliffy
Where are you from in Michigan? That’s how I learned to play, too.
Metro Detroit-- Dearborn, to be exact
I don’t get tp play much anymore, being in SoCal.
I learned to play in Southern Ohio. Whenever there was a family get-together or a party, there was a euchre game going on.
Especially at parties. We would play all night. The team that one stayed at the table and the next challenger team would sit down.
Good times.
Huh. I’m a yooper from Marquette.
I grew up in south-central Wisconsin (near Madison) and Euchre was probably the second card game I learned (after War). We used to play it on the bus on the way to grade school when we were kids. We used to play a variation called “Dirty Clubs” but I can’t remember the exact rules for that. (I seem to remember bidding on the number of tricks you thought you would get and if a club was turned up it was automatically trump.)
My wife’s late grandfather helped start a Euchre league around there in the 1930’s that is still going strong. (He played in it for over 60 years.) They play on Thursday nights from November through April. Each team has a home bar they play at and the results are printed in the weekly papers of the small towns where they play.
Sheepshead is big in Milwaukee and different from Euchre from what I remember. We never played that where I grew up. I tried learning that in the dorms in college from the Milwaukee guys but I never really figured it out.
I’ve lived in Michigan my whole life and watched family members play since I was little, but I didn’t learn until college. And I never got good until I started the job I have now, where we play euchre nearly every day during our afternoon break. (I was infamous for re-nigging - unintentionally - for YEARS.)
Grew up in Michigan, learned to play in Junior High.
Moved to Alabama and no one’s heard of it.
“Screw the dealer”… “Ace-no-face”… “Farmer’s Hand”… man, you’re all taking me back here. Thanks!
I’m another native Michigander (now living in DC), but I had only very limited experience with Euchre – no one in my family played – until I went to college at Michigan State. My sophomore year, if I wasn’t playing Mario Kart 64, I was playing Euchre. We even organized tournaments for our dorm floor in the study lounges, and I actually was quite good back then.
I’d love to play now, but I can never find anyone that knows how, and playing online doesn’t do much for me, because trusting your partner plays such a key role in the game.
Good times, good times.
Wow! This brings back many happy college memories. I grew up in a suburb of Indianapolis and went to college in the midwest. We played all the time. It was a great game at parties because you could drink a bit and not have to remember too many complicated rules (depending on how you played–we kept it simple).
Gosh, I haven’t played in probably 10 years. Now I miss it.
No, its really just an extension of euchre with 10 cards per person, auction bidding and a joker as “best bower”, ie highest card. 500
Heh…just wanted to point out the listing on the SDMB front page:
I grew up being dragged either to my godparents or my grandparents at least twice a week so my parents could play cards. Notice, the game was so pervasive it didn’t even need naming, it was just presumed that euchre was the order of the day and it nearly always was. Family holiday gatherings sometimes saw as many as 5 separate tables playing simultaneously.
I swore that I’d never ever play it, refused to learn, was determined to actually have A Life when I got older, one that was much much better than sitting around with your parents playing euchre!
Then, at about 18, all my friends started playing. Being the outcast making snide remarks got old after about a week, so I finally caved. Whenever there’s downtime at work, you can always pick up a game without going far, I’ve participated in tournaments many times, play online, total addict now.
I did manage to keep it from the rest of the family at least until my mid-twenties, though!
I have a confession to make.
I have lived in Michigan, my entire life. I come from 2 euchre playing families. I grew up around the game constantly. I did not learn how to play until last year at the age of 33. :o
I was able to hide it until the euchre tournaments started at the bar last summer. My friends, to say the least, were appalled.
Now, they’re sorry they taught me.
After preview, I see I’m not the only one Tsarina, but at least you managed to learn in college.
I played 2,3, and 4 hand euchre incessantly when I lived in southern Ontario during my high school and university years up until 1974. Since then having lived mostly in the west from northwestern Ontario to BC, I’ve never found anyone to play with. Its the only game I know of that you keep score with the cards themselves.
To answer the OP: Most of my fraternity brothers at Eastern Kentucky University played it all the time. When I arrived my older brother taught me how to play, and then he taught me how to stack the deck. I don’t know if he learned how to play at college or in the Army.
I disagree, Cowgirl . “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.” Stacking the deck was generally considered a talent to appreciate. ‘Pause-passing’ by the dealer’s partner was common (you could practically use a timer to determine exactly how good his hand was in the suit that was up). Hand signals (e.g. rubbing your ring finger to indicate being good in diamonds) were less common, and considered cheating cheating. ‘Sprouting points’ was one of the most dishonorable ways to cheat.
C’mon, the game was built for cheating. Stacking the deck was half the game. I don’t know if this method of dealing is standard, but the way we did it was that the dealer would deal each player 5 cards in 2 rounds – first he would give each player between 1 to 4 cards (sometimes only 2 or 3 were allowed, especially in tournaments) and on the 2nd round would give each player enough for them to have 5 cards (i.e. the difference between 5 and what they got the first time). This was at the dealer’s discression.
Example: Dealer deals 4 to the player to his left, then 3 to his partner, 2 to the player to his right, and 1 to himself. On the next round he would have to deal 1, 2, 3 and 4. Is this how the cards are dealt with you guys?
Couple that with the fact that there are only 24 cards, and stacking the deck is fairly easy.
Now, in a tournament, there were safegards against cheating, such as you could only deal cards in 2’s and 3’s, which meant that a stacked deck could be fairly well negated by a 1-card cut. Also, ‘table-talk’ would get you in a lot of trouble. I believe that a caught renig would be treated as if the offender’s side didn’t take a single trick. Since you only played with each person once, and each person would be your direct opponent twice, and you were competing against everybody for the money, there wasn’t much of a signaling problem. But it was assummed that a player would stack the deck as much as he could without being obvious, and that your current partner would pause-pass if you dealt and he had a decent hand in the suit that was turned up, but not good enough to call it up.
Whether or not you could throw in an “Ace no face” was usually established before the game, but it was pretty much universal that you could throw in a “Farmer’s hand”, which was ALL 9’s and 10’s (No face cards or aces at all. [When you think about it, an ace-no-face isn’t THAT bad a hand.]) This meant that everybody threw in their cards and the next player dealt. (A redeal, but the dealer lost the deal, and the player to his left dealt the next hand. That hand was essentially thrown out.) You may think that losing the deal was unfair to the dealer, but remember, almost everybody stacked the deck to some extent. Dealing the opponents a farmer’s hand was sort of a punishment for stacking TOO well.
We always played “Dick the dealer”. I hate playing computer Euchre games where the dealer will just pass on the 2nd round.