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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

*I recently stumbled upon this, but haven't had the time to play yet. It seems like it would be fun.

I've recently started learning card games that use a standard deck of playing cards and have been pleased with many of them. The advantage over trading card games is that it is MUCH cheaper and takes up a lot less space and it doesn't feel like I'm chasing an impossible goal.

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A number of years ago I was at a friend's house and he wanted to play Uno but he couldn't be cause his dog got into the deck and many of the cards were damaged.

I noticed he had a couple of packs of playing cards on his coffee table and upon closer inspection, I realized that each card in Uno maps to a card in 52 card deck. A standard Uno deck has 108 cards, which is a standard 52-card deck plus the jokers.

So we played Uno with his two decks of playing cards.

That's interesting. I always assumed that UNO was a branded version of a very similar game we used to play as kids with a regular deck of cards (e.g. 7 is draw 2, Jack allows you to pick a color). The game is called Tschau Sepp and very commonly played in Switzerland. I just assumed other countries had their own version of it, and that UNO derived from it.

Called mau mau in germany

A similar game called "Pesten" is played in the netherlands

Would not be surprised if there is a version of this game everywhere decks of cards are available

My friend, you just rediscovered Crazy Eights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Eights

In fact, Uno exists because one family liked playing Crazy Eights but got tired arguing about the rules, so they started writing the rules on the cards and eventually made new cards: https://www.museumofplay.org/toys/uno/

As with other commenters, we used to play a game similar to what is now Uno with a standard deck, we call it "pesten" (bullying), but the wiki page says it's similar to the US Crazy Eights, and internationally it's known as Mau-Mau [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau-Mau_(card_game)

A bit of a shameless plug, but maybe it could be of interest. Having been through a similar journey some years ago I spent some time back then to design a variation of Knizia’s Battle Line/Schotten Totten for a standard deck:

https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/191552/vassal

It is not the first such variant, but one that I felt a bit more pleased with than the other variants I found.

I tried to embark on this a few years ago, thinking particularly for cases where space is at a premium (airports) or I don't want to worry about wrecking/losing game components (camping, the beach).

Overall I didn't find a lot that I liked, particularly in the two-player space. Everything seemed to be either Rummy-family games around set collecting, or trick-taking games that might as well have been Hearts or Euchre.

All that to say, if you've got a few favourites, please recommend!

Solitaire based games have been big with my family recently. We sometimes do them cooperatively. If you go on YouTube, people have all kinds of newly invented ones or ones that are slight variations of another. Joker jailbreak is an example. Also Dungeon Crawl or Clear the Dungeon or something like that. I think I also watched a video for Osmosis. None of these are like Warhammer 40k exciting, but they are surprisingly fun at killing 10-15 minutes when you're waiting on your food. Even though they are 1 player games, my family and I frequently do it as a family activity or take turns. We keep a pack of playing cards in the glove compartment of the car so we never forget. I feel dumb for not learning more than a few card games as a kid.

With 6 people there is Russian go fish.

Two player games that can be played with a standard deck of cards:

Haggis, Greasy Spoon, Crisps, Dickory, Vidrasso, Cupid: Tricks and Tactics, Tuhao.

Packogame [0] makes a variety of games like that; I haven't played most of them but I can recommend Nut as well as Bus.

[0] https://Perplext.com

This actually also looks right up my alley. The recommendations on this thread are awesome. It looks like they have like 24 different small card games that fit into a tiny package. It's always hard for me to tell if I'll like it or not before playing though. I'm a lot more forgiving of short games though

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