Rules of Card Games: I Doubt It (1998) | Hacker News Reader

Rules of Card Games: I Doubt It (1998)

pagat.com

90 pointsjasim44 comments

I grew up playing a game we called 'Pounce'. I've also heard it called 'Nerts". In Pagat, it's apparently classified as 'Simultaneous Solitaire' and related to Klondike[0].

We played with as many as 12 players, all with a full deck of cards. All players set up similar to solitaire, with 13 cards in the 'pounce pile'. The objective was to play all the cards in your pounce pile, using regular solitaire rules, but playing on any player's foundation pile.

The game is very physical and intense. If two players can play the same card and there is one foundation pile qualified, they have to move fast. Hands collide, cards are bent, epithets hurled... It was common for players to leap to their feet, lurch across the table and body check their neighbor to play a card.

When a player exhausted their Pounce Pile, they'd holler 'POUNCE' and everyone had to stop play and take their score: Sort and count your cards in the foundation piles, and subtract 2x the number of cards remaining in your pounce pile. First player to 'X' (a pre-agreed threshold) wins.

In my life, I've never encountered another family who played this card game. Maybe you're familiar with it?

[0]https://www.pagat.com/patience/double.html

Seems somewhat similar to speed? https://cardsjd.com/speed/

My family does this! We call the game Demon, the piles “demon piles”, and we shout “demon” to end a round. The rules are the same as you described them, except possibly that we allow “stacking” multiple cards to place them on the same common pile simultaneously; this follows the same rules as placing them sequentially, except that (naturally) nobody else can interrupt. (I can remember a time when we played without this rule, so it may be a house rule.)

Great game! My family calls it nerts.

We called this "nuts". Same idea, but only 4 solitaire-style piles and 11 in the "nuts pile". First to clear the nuts pile gets bonus 10 points, Kings played on the table count for 5. Otherwise all the same.

Played this (or something very similar) growing up. We called it "squeak".

There's a great free implementation of this on steam, made a couple years ago by the same people that made spacechem and opus magnum: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1131190/NERTS_Online/

Fantastic, this is exactly the game, thanks!

I like how they didn't make it to sell, but just to replace their in-office games that had been interrupted by the pandemic.

My family played Pounce, as you describe. Our heyday was the mid-1980's, in a mid-Atlantic state.

This sounds really similar to Dutch Blitz! https://www.dutchblitz.com/ surprised I haven't seen anyone else call it that in this thread

I played this with my mother, and later my friends, quite a lot as a child. I'm glad you mentioned it, this brought back a lot of nice memories for me and I think I'm going to buy a few packs of cards the next time I'm out :)

I learned it as “Nerts” but my brother’s ex-girlfriend called it speed solitaire. We still play it with my family.

We play this exact game in my family, but we call it "Oh, hell!", which is what everyone else tells when someone goes out.

Man, Pagat.com is one of the true gems of the internet. I’ve been using it since I was a kid to learn games (and, more importantly, to win rules disputes while playing them). John McLeod deserves an award for compiling and maintaining such a compendious and well-organized project.

It's my go-to example of a really great traditional website.

I have a group of friends that discovered Doppelkopf through this site about twenty years ago (after trying out a number of related games) , and we still meet to play it.

The variant of this game I have always played allows for playing multiple cards on your turn as part of a set, so 3 queens for example.

We also played with the general rule that you can do anything outside the rules and as long as you can get through your turn without anyone calling you out in it you're in the clear. Playing more cards than you call is a pretty common cheat and it's always pure chaos when it happens and gets called out.

It can be a real friendship stressor so you have to have the right group of players for it, but it's always fun sharing the stupid cheats that people pulled off afterwards.

This was basically the same variant I played. The rules core rules were simple and basically anything that wasn't covered by those rules was allowed. Any kind of trickery or sleight of hand to dump your cards was completely fair game.

Dropping more cards than you called was common, but even secretly putting cards on the pile even when it wasn't your turn was common, if your sleight of hand was good enough and misdirection was good enough.

If you got up to go to the bathroom you could be certain that the remain players all put half their hands in the pile and covered for each other.

Very, very fun game.

>you could be certain that the remain players all put half their hands in the pile

Then just call them out for cheating and they have to split the deck.

Unless they didn’t then the deck is yours.

This is the variant that I've played - with the constraint that you must play at least one card, of course. We also included an endgame for the players that had managed to get rid of all their cards, though: they had to successfully guess whether the person sitting beside them was bluffing or not three times in a row in order to win, and had to pick up some cards and resume play if they didn't.

E: Since this was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the variant I played only allows for the next player to challenge.

Pagat.com is great. I also discovered Ambition, a 4-player trick taking game I recommend highly, through it.

Ambition-- https://www.pagat.com/invented/ambition.html

I discovered another 4-player trick taking game through it, Doppelkopf - https://www.pagat.com/schafkopf/doko.html .

It uses a double pack of cards, so every card is in there twice. You play with your partner against the other two players, but at the start of each deal you don't know who your partner is (the two players with a queen of clubs are together). There are more trumps than non-trumps. And there is a long list of fun optional house rules to choose from.

Bluff is a good party game, I have played it many times with many different guests. If playing with many people use 2 decks instead of 1 and only the people sitting close to the current player can Challenge - otherwise there is always somebody that wants to challenge and the game does not progress.

Trick to winning (mostly) is to first bluff by playing your singles and then playing your real ones at the end of the round and try to make people think you bluff.

I agree that John McLeod deserves an award for his work.

I used to play Bluff as a kid, and we did not have the rule that only the next player can challenge. I agree that such a rule makes it better - and is necessary if you have more than 4 players. When we'd have, say, 6 players, almost every move would get challenged, and the winner usually was the one who never bluffs, which makes it a lot less fun.

That's how I've always played too. If only the next player can challenge I can imagine table position would play a huge role in the outcome.

If you're able to pay in front of the most risk-averse player you probably won't be called on as many bluffs. If you play behind the most risk-averse player you probably won't have to risk challenging much either.

>and the winner usually was the one who never bluffs

Once everyone starts playing by this strategy people will not want to challenge as they will always fail. Since people are no longer challenging it is safer to start cheating again.

You just want a reputation for never bluffing.

We played a variant of this in Poland called "Oszust" (liar). Jokers were used and counted as any card.

Person who has 2 hears starts and plays it openly. Every other card is played covered.

You can play 1,3 or more cards at once (you can't play 2). You can play cards of the same rank as the last person or 1 higher than the last person.

You can cheat by playing more or less cards than declared as well as lying about their ranks. At any time anyone can say "oszust" and check last played cards and either he or the person lying takes all cards except the first from the discard stack.

Also if you don't play any cards in a given round - you have to take 1 card from the unused cards stack. If the stack of unused cards is empty you put all cards from the discard stack except the last into the unused cards stack and continue.

The player who has no cards wins. Then the rest continue for the 2nd, 3rd etc places. When 2 players remain they both are losers and the game ends.

We played this on every break at university, sometimes with double deck and 8 people playing. It's great for bluffing and psychologic warfare.

I changed the year to 1998 per https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.pagat.com/beating/..., which is pretty cool to see.

I didn't see this at pagat.com, but for the booklet of games one can play with Rook cards (including "I Doubt It" and maybe around 20 games total, curiously not all listed in its table of contents, but for a variety of ages & difficulty levels) is at archive.org (dated 1924). I was relieved to find it, since the cards we purchased from Hasbro didn't have this info.

https://archive.org/details/rook-instruction-manual-1924-ima...

Same game with dice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudo

The way we played it, you had to put at least one card down on your turn. So, if you didn’t have any of that card, you had to bluff. You could put as many cards down as you wanted. You had to state how many cards you were adding to the stack.

It was funny when someone got called on their bluff, picked up the stack and looked at it, and then announced incredulously that everyone before them had been lying too.

Of course lying about the lying is part of the strategy as well.

Not a classic card game but Coup (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/131357/coup) is based on a similar mechanic of claiming what you're playing and being called out but with more interestingly interacting card abilities. I thoroughly recommend it.

This is a great game. My wife's family plays it. It's funny to watch new players realize how cheat-y the game is.

This game was really fun until you figure out the insight that the card ranks you'll need are known in advance just by counting off to your left. If I know I need an Ace, a 4, a 7, a 10, etc, I can plan the whole game around calling "BS" on the ranks I don't have yet to pick up those needed cards.

At this point the game becomes like Tic Tac Toe :)

I don't understand. It says your goal is to get rid of all your cards, not get every card.

Right, but people will call "I Doubt It" on your last card to keep you from winning, so if you know the card you'll need to play you can dump cards here or there by bluffing to set up for it (or, as OP suggests, get that card by thinking ahead, but I wouldn't agree with that strategy since half the time you'll get garbage from lies or picking up a large pile).

Yes, there is strategy in the game. But other players can counter strategy.

That is the whole point of a good game. Strategy, but no perfect strategy.

The variant explained in the page doesn't allow for this pre-planning. You don't know what rank you will need, because you won't know what the next lead will declare when they start a round.

Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what ruleset is described by that comment. The use of offsets seems to suggest that the card needed to play starts at a particular offset "A", and then rotates as the turn moves around the table. But then, if any players pass, that would throw off your offset... So count me confused.

You basically have it right, except there's no option to pass either. They're describing this variant:

https://www.pagat.com/beating/cheat.html

Except you also have to pickup all the other cards placed, as well, which could be a huge stack. Also, you still have to get rid of the cards you have, which you might not end up needing to place.

There is no perfect strategy in this game.

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