Card Game Rules | Hacker News Reader

Card Game Rules

pagat.com

137 pointsbeermonster29 comments

Some great indexes here. I often link https://www.pagat.com/class/

My favorite card came discovery in adult life was the climbing genre. Haggis, Tichu, Dou Dizhu

My second was learning about Cuttle and the timing of it/Magic the Gathering

The company I interned at back in '08 had multiple Tichu games going daily over lunch. It's where I learned to love the game. Sadly, they had a hiring freeze when I graduated in '09, and I had to move on. I still play, but I will always look back fondly on those daily games over lunch.

When I do play Tichu these days, it's actually with the designer of Haggis, Sean Ross. He's been putting out a lot of traditionally inspired games over the past few years. He just published a game called Bacon which is a climbing game based on the traditional climbing game Guan Dan (https://www.pagat.com/climbing/guan_dan.html). I'd recommend checking out both games! The hand size in Guan Dan is 27 cards, and that's not even the most in a traditional climbing game!

An updated version of Haggis will also be coming out later this year, and it will support playing up to 6 players. The 4-player partnership version is particularly good. The reprint will also include some updated rules for the 3-player game, which I like a lot too.

(I'd give you some BGG links, but it looks like it's currently down for maintenance.)

That aside, Pagat is truly a gem. One of the best sites on the internet. I have spent hours and hours there learning and trying obscure card games. Thank you, John McLeod.

most excellent. i've had a little interaction with sean, and recall some thoughts he shared in a thread about changes to haggis (in bgg). love to hear there is an update coming later this year!

something i like about my copies of the original printing are the little rule/scoring cards that were great to hand to friends learning. i would love to pick up reprints

mcleod++ thanks for the info

A really great resource. My usual game reference, BoardGameGeek, has a lot of the same info ultimately, but if you just want purely standard card game info, this is much better organized and displayed.

Side note: Kind of funny that the site has Deutsch and English language options, but the cookie notice is in Italian. Anyone know why that is?

> the cookie notice is in Italian. Anyone know why that is?

I don't know why that is, but it's on purpose. They are using cookieconsent2 from NPM but overrode the message strings.

I enjoy some games played with rook cards (or numbered cards: 4 colored suites of 14 cards each):

https://www.pagat.com/kt5/rook.html

https://archive.org/details/rook-instruction-manual-1924-ima... (This actually has rules for more games than are found in its own table of contents.)

There are many, for different ages and effort levels. (And with minimal adaptation, the same cards can be used for games normally associated with standard playing card decks, or "go fish" for children, or whatever.)

You can play solitaire family games in exaequOS: https://exaequos.com/?a=/usr/games/csol

I love pagat.com and it is often used as an authority source of game rules. Related note: it links to my own card game that I created: https://luris.org

Is creating real money multiplayer versions of all these not a giant untapped opportunity? Cards and wagering are often a potent mix, yet only hold'em and rummy have gone in this direction for some reason

Legal hurdles + not a lot of interest, probably.

People who are willing to spend time to learn a game usually "converge" on games where there's a large community, and pretty much every popular game under the sun that's in the public domain has been implemented over and over.

My go-to example of an ancient website that's still around and useful.

What are the best digital interfaces for playing card games in-person? They have to be good enough to convert people who love faffing about with physical cards (not me).

That's just not the right question to be asking. Not everything needs to be digital. If you think handling physical cards is "faffing about", it's just not for you and that's ok.

Edit: How you're holding and dealing the cards is quite literally part of the game. You can read people by how they fling the cards when dealing or how they rearrange in their hands, etc. It's meant to be a tactile experience. It's part of the fun. Yes of course you can play whatever you want online. Call me old fashioned, but 5 dudes at a table playing cards on their phone just grosses me out.

Actually it's OK if someone else would like to play cards in person without physical cards.

Is it?

Yes

Further to this, I would say that if you want to get together in person and have a digitally mediated gaming experience, even a turn based one, there are of lot of those to be had that are much richer and more interesting in uniquely-digital ways than simply playing an on-screen version of a game that was meant to be a pack of cards— an obvious example is Civ 6: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sid-meiers-civilization-vi/id1...

For me at least, part of the delight of a truly analogue tabletop game is experiencing all the little design tricks that are used to elegantly implement complex game mechanics (scoring, hidden info, turn taking, catch-up, etc) within the constraints imposed by bits of cardboard and plastic. Once a computer is part of the equation anyway, there's no point in any of that, and you might as well just be playing a game that is native to that platform.

What a strange response. It's perfectly acceptable for someone to enjoy card games while not enjoying physically handling cards.

I'm not saying my way is the right way or your way is the wrong way, I'm asking what's the best way to do things my way (to meet some people I know half way).

"Actually you're doing it wrong and you shouldn't even be asking this question" - feels just like StackOverflow!

It might well gross _you_ out, but that doesn't make it wrong. Some people socialize in different ways from you, and that's ok.

Some of the most entertaining experiences I’ve had are with stupid card decks where the back pattern/image isn’t mirrored. So you could tell eg in Monopoly Deal if someone was holding a dual-colored property card as the card would be held upside down, whereas all other types of cards would only ever be held one way.

Similarly if you play a pack for a while and notice a particular card has a scruff or bend on it. Definitely had that while playing with a friends Uno deck.

Fun times…

But I can definitely appreciate some people wanting to try digital in-person. Games like Codenames take a few minutes to set up (plus shuffle time), and I’d rather spend time playing than doing mundane setup. Would love to see a product that can do it right…!

Having played Gloomhaven on the Steam Game, I cannot _imagine_ spending the setup time on the physical version. But I'd still love to be in-person while playing!

Honestly, same (but even more so) for D&D and other TTRPGs - automate away all the calculation, dice rolls, etc. for me, give me an easily referencable and clickable character sheet with all my options, but let me enjoy my friends' energy face-to-face!

> How you're holding and dealing the cards is quite literally part of the game. You can read people by how they fling the cards when dealing or how they rearrange in their hands, etc. It's meant to be a tactile experience. It's part of the fun.

For some people. Others (like myself!) actively dislike games where you have to read social cues, and prefer to be able to focus on the explicit (not implicit) game mechanics, keeping their socializing brain separate from (but still active during!) game-playing. Again - other people can enjoy things in other ways to you, and (so long as they're not hurting anyway) they are not wrong to do so.

It's not a card game, but SpaceTeam is a local digital game that convinced me that there's a lot of unexplored space for in-person digital interaction.

Ironically, Spaceteam was later ported to a physical game, that isn’t quite as good.

Tabletop Simulator and https://github.com/mPyKen/Cards-Simulator seems alright.

I've wanted to write a Web-based "card table" for some time but there's always some area I am ignorant in and so I have been unable to connect all the dots.

I'd still love to do it some day.

I've played cards with friends in person using Trickster Cards (https://www.trickstercards.com) on our phones. It has a very nice, simple UX for friends to join your games and to set various options to lock out randos if you want to. The iOS app is free IIRC and the paid options are mostly if you want to play with others online in more ranked, league-type play.

I've found it nice for situations where everyone is in the same room and physical cards are possible, but one player may need to leave the room to monitor a dish that is slow-cooking or check on kids or work or whatever.

edit: the other time it came in really handy was in conditions adverse to cards (super windy, no table top, etc), but we all really wanted to get some hearts or euchre in :).

https://tabletopia.com/ seems to be a freemium platform for playing many (all?) commercial boardgames and also many standard card games: hearts, bridge, whist, poker etc. and appears to simulate a tabletop for playing with others or solo. I have not played it much but it seems intuitive as a platform for playing many different boardgames online, but is a bit clunky compared to a purpose-built online game.

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