Card games

A while ago I talked about the type of board games I’ve been playing in the last 7 or 8 years or so. Before I discovered those games I played a lot of card games, and I still play cards on occasion.

The number one rule in any real card game is you have to follow suit. This means that if the person who leads plays a club (for example) then you have to play a club (if you don’t have one you can play whatever you want). If you’re playing a card game that doesn’t contain this rule, it’s not a real card game.

Many games contain the concept of trump. Trump is a suit that’s (temporarily) better than the other suits — for example, if diamonds is trump then any diamond will beat any club, heart, or spade.

When each player plays one card (in clockwise order), that’s called a trick.

Here are the best card games:

  • Bid euchre
    • This game is played with 2 decks of 9 and up. Along with your partner you bid on the number of tricks you think you will take. Whoever bids the highest gets to make trump, pick up the “kitty” (4 cards left over after dealing) and discard 4 cards, and lead. In addition to having one of the 4 suits trump you can also have high (aces are best) or low (9s are best). The other team tries to stop you from making your bid. Everyone deals twice, so a 4-player game lasts 8 rounds.
    • If you make your bid you get as many points as you have tricks. If you don’t make your bid you get negative the number of tricks you bid. The other team gets as many points as they have tricks.
    • You can go alone for 20 points by taking your partner’s two best cards (and discarding two more) or 40 points with no cards from your partner — but you have to get all 10 tricks.
  • Hearts
    • The lowest score wins in this game. Each heart is worth 1 point and the queen of spades is worth 13 points. If you take a trick with a heart or the queen of spades on it you get those points. Most of the time you’re trying not to take tricks with points on them. The game ends when one person gets more than 100 points. The person with the 2 of clubs leads the first trick.
    • An alternative strategy in any particular round is to take all of the points — if you’re successful you get 0 points and all other players get 26 points (if you’re not successful you might get a lot of points).
    • At the beginning of most rounds you pass 3 cards to another player. In a 4-player game you would pass to the person on your left, the person across from you, the person on your right, and then yourself (ie. every 4th round is a “keep” round).
  • Oh heck
    • After dealing to all players a card is turned up to indicate trump. You bid on how many tricks you think you will take. Then you try to get exactly that many — if you get exactly the number of tricks you bid you get a 10-point bonus. If you don’t get the number of tricks you bid you get for points the number of tricks you take. So if you bid 3 and take 3 you get 13 points. If you bid 3 and take 2 you get 2 points. If you bid 3 and take 4 you get 4 points. The person to the left of the dealer leads.
    • In the first round you get 7 cards (this number can easily be changed), then in the second round you get 6, and so on all the way down to 1 card — and then you go back up to 7.
    • When the dealer bids they can’t bid a number that will make the number of bids equal the number of tricks — for example, if you have 7 cards and 5 tricks have already been bid the dealer can’t bid 2 (they can bid 0, 1, 3, or higher).

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2012 at 12:16 pm and is filed under My thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply