This is a reprint of an article written in August, 2006 for first publication in the January, 2007 issue of the now-defunct Knucklebones magazine. Because of its origins, this article is more introductory and (hopefully) more polished than many of my online writings. Despite the original source of this article, this blog is in no way associated with Jones Publishing or Knucklebones Magazine.
Card games are a great American past time. Many of us remember games of War, Old Maid, and Go Fish from our childhoods. We might have played Rummy, Euchre, Spades, or Hearts with our families while growing up. Poker and Bridge remain great reasons to get together with friends, while Solitaire keeps our attention when we can’t find other people to play games with.
Traditional card games are great, because with a single deck of cards — and possibly a few accessories, like Poker chips and a scoring pad — you can literally play hundreds of different games. However, traditional card games are, out of necessity, traditional. Sometimes we want a bit more … and in the last ten years, commercial games have begun to fill this void. Increasingly we can find commercial card games that use familiar and standard mechanics — like Bridge’s trick-taking, Rummy’s set-collection, and Poker’s hand-comparison. However, these new games also tend to very original and innovative as well.
Modern Card Game Releases
Designers have many different reasons for creating commercial games in traditional molds.
Mike Fitzgerald is one of the most notable designers of commercial traditionals, with over a half-a-dozen games in that style under his belt. Speaking of his Mystery Rummy games, he says, “I was looking to make Rummy variants with … some interesting play for more serious gamers.” Good designers can fine-tune traditionals to make them really sparkle, offering specific opportunities for strategy rather than depending on such evolving naturally as a game does.
Jim Dietz is a publisher of several commercial traditional games, while K.C. Humphrey is the designer of the Poker variant, Havoc: The Hundred Years War. They both agree on an important reason for new traditionals. Jim Dietz says, simply: “[T]here is often enjoyment that comes from adding a theme — whether it is a film, book, or game.” K.C. Humphrey expands upon that: “Poker is still fun, so are Chess and Mah Jongg. But a variant with a nice theme that grabs you can really make an evening with friends, where playing a traditional game might not have.”
Frank Branham is a game designer whose designs include the trick-taking game Four Dragons. He offers a third reason for commercial traditionals: “Commercial games give you the chance to create custom decks. This allows you to twist the deck distribution (The Great Dalmuti) and put game information on the cards themselves (Canasta Caliente) to make it easier to play a more complex game. Or you can support more players be creating 5 or 6-suited decks (David & Goliath), or suits that rank from 3-21.”
Due to these advantages and others the field of new, commercial traditionals has really heated up in the last decade. Trick-taking games and set-collection games have seen the most interest, but a few hand-comparison and value-climbing games have also appeared, as well as many more obscure commercial variants.
Trick-Taking Games
Trick-taking games are one of the most well-known and well-loved styles of card games. In these games players play cards one at a time into “tricks”. One player wins each trick, and by doing so tends to accrue (or lose) points. Many trick-taking games also involve bidding, where a player makes a commitment as to how many tricks he can take. Partnerships are also an element of many, though not all, trick-taking games.
Bridge isn’t as popular as it was 50 years ago, but with an estimated 10 million players it’s still one of the best-known trick-taking games. It has all the classic elements — bidding, partners, and tricks — but also is quite baroque to learn. Other traditional trick-taking games include Spades, Euchre, and Hearts, the last being somewhat unique for being a “reverse trick-taking game” where players lose points for taking certain undesirable cards.
Among commercial card games, trick-taking is a pretty common style of play. Some games are clearly intended to be similar to popular traditional games, while others go pretty far afield to introduce new styles of strategy.
Mü & More’s “Mü” (Rio Grande Games) by Doris Matthaus and Frank Nestel is one of the best. Players uniquely bid by playing cards to the table, expressing their desire for certain trumps. Eventually two players become partners (meaning that you can be part of a different partnership every round) and they try and complete a contract. In the process, two trumps are also declared, and they can be suits or numbers.
Four Dragons (Jolly Roger Games) is Frank Branham’s trick-taking game. It’s another partnership game, but without bidding. The interplay of the cards is quite complex. Some cards let you ask questions of your opponents, while others allow you to swap cards with your partner. Cards are colored, and only one card of each non-black color can be played to each trick. Other cards have unique valuations: 3s always beat 10s, for example, but lose to most other cards. To win the game you must collect specific cards — earth and rain — but you only score based upon matched pairs of those cards. The result is very strategic and thoughtful gameplay that plays more like a puzzle than any traditional trick-taking games.
Four Dragons’ Frank Branham likes trick-taking games because of their simplicity. He says, “There is a certain elegance in a trick taking game … You only have one action every turn — play a card from your hand face up. However, the process of making that seemingly simple decision can be difficult indeed. It requires learning the basic of trick-taking, suit play, memorization, learning patterns of other players, and sometimes extremely complex valuation.”
A few other examples of commercial trick-taking games include: Reinhard Staupe’s David & Goliath (Playroom Entertainment), wherein the high-card player and the low-card player each get some cards each trick; Talon Douds’ Victory & Honor (Jolly Roger Games), where you simultaneously play three tricks at a time; and Gunter Burkhardt’s Trump, Tricks, Game!, in which you use the cards you won in one round of play to play the next. Each is unique, and very different from traditional trick-taking gameplay.
Most of these games are quite lightly themed. Mü and Four Dragons have beautiful card designs, but the strange creatures of Mü and the Asian designs of Four Dragons don’t impact the game much. Victory & Honor, however, is an example of a deeply themed trick-taking game. Those three simultaneous tricks are meant to represent the three flanks of a Civil War battle. Jim Dietz, the game’s publisher, agrees that themes are an important element of new traditionals. He says: “It’s more interesting to say ‘I captured an artillery and two generals’ than ‘I got the 10, 7, and 4 of Spades.”
Set-Collection Games
The object of set-collection games is to collect linked series of cards. These sequences typically involve “runs” (e.g., 1-2-3) and “sets” (e.g., three Aces), but really any formula could be used to form a set in a set-collection game. While many set-collection games involve you building only upon your own sets, some allow you to build on other players’ sets as well with a “lay-off”.
In most traditional set-collection games you’re given an initial set of cards and you try and bring order to that initial chaotic offering, but in commercial traditionals you often build your sets of cards as you go.
The best known traditional set-collection game is Rummy in its variants as Rummy 500, Gin Rummy, or even Canasta, which together highlight how you can play set-collection games one-on-one, multiplayer, or in partnerships.
One of the most clever commercial set-collection games is Mystery Rummy (U.S. Game Systems) — four editions of which have been published. Each one is strongly themed, the first three around Victorian mysteries (Jack the Ripper, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and the fourth around mobsters (Al Capone). In many ways they’re very traditional Rummy games. You lay down sets (largely just copies of identical cards) and can lay-off of other peoples’ sets. The object is to get as many of your cards out of your hand as you can before the other players do.
However, there’s also color and mystery built into each game. In Jack the Ripper cards played eventually reveal who the Ripper is, and his cards are worth bonus points. In Murders in the Rue Morgue players can make brilliant deductions (worth bonus points) if they collect certain matched sets of cards. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has a unique system where you can only play Jekyll or Hyde cards at any time. Each game also has some strategy that you wouldn’t find in a normal Rummy game because you can often play special “gavel” cards to get extra cards from discard piles, draw piles, or even other players.
Mike Fitzgerald, the designer of the Mystery Rummies reflects that he created them because of his love of traditional play styles: “I have very fond memories of playing 500 rummy (we did 1,000,000 rummy) summers as a child … I also felt that the rummy mechanic lends itself to a theme about collecting information that builds upon itself as in mysteries. … I had originally thought 3 would be enough but as long as I keep coming up with an idea to distinguish each game from each other I figure I will keep going.”
Set-collection games are also very popular among German-style game designers, though these games tend to be more simplistic than Rummy itself. Coloretto (Rio Grande Games) is one of the best sellers in this category. Players draft cards from a central draw area in order to form sets of colored chameleon cards, but if they end up with more than three sets the extras score negative points. King’s Breakfast (Rio Grande Games) is another game where players must be careful in their selections. They must collect large sets of food items, but if they end up with more food than the king, they score no points.
Set-collection is also often found as an element of more complex games. The award-winning railroad game Ticket to Ride (Days of Wonder) is actually a set-collection game. Players are attempting to gather together sets of identically colored cards which they can then use to lay train routes.
Hand Comparison Games
There’s only one traditional hand-comparison (or “vying”) games that’s of any note, and that’s Poker. Players slowly accrue cards and ultimately compare their cards with those held by other players, then the highest ranked sets of cards wins. Hand-comparison games also share one other very unique gameplay element: betting. By betting players try and show the strengths of their own hands and to assess the strengths of their opponents—or in some cases bluff as to what they’re holding.
Poker has been a traditional card game of choice at least back through the Old West, but it’s gained a new interest among card players in the last five or six years. This is largely due to the broadcasting of Poker tournaments on TV and due to the invention of the hole-card camera which allows TV viewers to see a player’s hidden cards. The variant of Poker that has come out of these televised events is “Texas Hold ‘em”, a very serious, strategic game that minimizes luck and maximizes the effects of good bidding and bluffing. (Some call it a game of pure bluff.)
Hand-comparison games aren’t too widely published in the commercial world, no doubt due to the general success of unadulterated Poker. However a few notables have appeared in the last couple of years.
Havoc: The Hundred Years War (Sunriver Games) emulates the major battles of that conflict. Players build hands through card drafting — selecting from among face-up cards, — and then they choose whether to play a handful of cards (or not) when a war occurs. Poker is thus extended into a strategic framework where deciding how to build your hand and when to use it is as important as figuring out the strengths of your opponents’ hands.
Ironically, designer KC Humphrey came upon his gameplay somewhat by accident. He says, “I didn’t set out to create a Poker variant. I wanted a game where a player would be recruiting part of the time and fighting part of the time by playing sets they’d collected. Poker seemed like a natural set of ‘what beats what’ with a nice variety of possible hands which most people were familiar with.” Sometimes new card games are made in the traditional molds simply because they’re well-tried and trusted game mechanics.
Parlay (Real Deal Games) is a unique Poker word game, where each card features a traditional card face (e.g., the Jack of Spades) and a letter. Players are simultaneously trying to create hands that form both good words and good Poker hands, and ultimately each hand is won by the player who manages this balance best.
Three-Dragon Ante (Wizards of the Coast) is an imagining of what a Poker game might be like in the fantasy world of the Dungeons & Dragons game. It’s an innovative and fun game where players attempt to create flights of dragons, but where the dragons’ special powers can upset the game. Unlike Havoc and Parlay, Three-Dragon Ante isn’t a game that uses Poker mechanics; instead it’s a whole new way to play Poker.
Some German-style games use an all-or-nothing bidding mechanism like that found in Poker without actually using hand comparison. Reiner Knizia’s auction games Beowulf: The Legend (Fantasy Flight Games) and Taj Mahal (Rio Grande Games) are two examples. In each game players lose everything they bid, whether they win a round of play or not, just like you lose everything you put into the pot in Poker.
Value Climbing Games
Value-climbing games are a traditional card game mechanic widely seen in Asian games but they aren’t as frequent in America. The object of these games is to empty your hand of cards. This is done by playing “tricks” of a sort, except that players may play multiple cards into a single trick over multiple rounds.
A “trick” starts when a player either plays a single card, a pair, a triplet, or a five-card hand (which can be one of several Poker-like sets: a flush, a straight, a full house, or a straight flush). Players then follow in the trick by playing the same number of cards, but of higher value — or else by passing. So, a pair of twos might be followed by a pair of sevens. Or, a flush of green cards could be followed by a flush of red cards, then a straight, then a full house.
Play continues around (and around) the table until no one can play, and then the last person to play to the trick takes it and gets to start a new one. Carefully breaking down your hand to figure out how to get rid of all of your cards is important, as is controlling the lead so that you can start the right sorts of tricks to optimize your cardplay.
In 2002 two companies released relatively traditional versions of these games. However, because of their Asian origin these games use unique decks of cards that couldn’t be easily copied with a traditional American card deck. One was Golden Deuce (Playroom Entertainment) which is a family-oriented version of the game with some elements of luck, while another is Gang of Four (Days of Wonder), which is a serious and strategic variant. Gang of Four was just re-released in a new edition last Summer.
Mark Kaufman, in discussing his company’s publication of Gang of Four, reveals that even when a commercial company produces a fairly traditional game, they still tweak it to try and improve the gameplay: “While Gang of Four’s underlying mechanics are similar to Choh Dai Di and other Chinese street card games, Lee Yih introduced several aspects that are subtle but have a significant impact on the game. The use of only 3 suits of cards, tightens up the tactical play. The scoring system, which is more punitive to those who are caught holding high numbers of cards, really effects the meta-game of how people work with or against each other to improve their position in the game. And the possibility of the Gang of Four [a four of a kind] being dropped at anytime adds a very important element of risk that you might be trumped, no matter how strong your play.”
The Great Dalmutti (Wizards of the Coast) and Dilbert: Corporate Shuffle (Wizards of the Coast) are party games in the value-climbing genre, while another strategic entrant — this one originating in Germany — is Tichu (Abacus Spiele). Each game offers some slight variants on the standard value-climbing gameplay.
Other Card Games
The world is full of other traditional card games, and commercial variants have appeared for many of them.
In card-matching games players try and empty their hands of cards by matching (via some method) the last card played. Crazy Eights and the commercial Uno (Mattel) are the two best known examples of this gameplay. Steve Jackson Games published the thematic Spooks in this genre while Mike Fitzgerald’s Lord of the Rings Tarot Deck and Card Game (U.S. Game Systems) is another themed commercial example.
Solitaire is a sort of one-player card-matching. Many variants have been created with traditional card decks. A commercial variant is “Solar Solitaire” — one of the games in Space Dominoes (Games & Names), where you try and create structures by matching the three-piece dominoes show on each card.
Card-fishing games feature a central pool of cards. You take cards from that pool by playing certain (matching) cards to the table. Casino, one of the few traditional games in this style, disappeared after the 19th century, but modern games like Anathema (APE Games) and “Safarü” in Mü & More (Rio Grande Games) keep the genre alive.
For every card game mentioned here, there are probably five or ten more actually available in print. If you’ve never gone beyond a traditional deck of cards, you may want to take a look at some of the new traditionals available commercially today. They could be your next Bridge, Hearts, or Poker, leading to hundreds of hours of enjoyable play.
Non-Traditional Card Decks
This related topic was printed as a box in the original article.
Some designers have done more than just create a commercial traditional game; instead they’ve created whole new decks of cards and published multiple games for use with them.
Mü & More features a 5-suited deck, with each suit represented by a color. The suits have twelve cards each, numbered 0-9 with duplicates of the 1 and the 7. In addition each card has a scoring value of 0-2. The nicest element of these cards is that they feature beautiful Celtic-inspired artwork by German artist Doris Matthäus.
There are five different games included with this deck of cards. Three are trick-taking games: “Mü”, “Wimmüln”, and “The Last Panther”. Mü is one of the best examples of the genre, while The Last Panther is a reverse trick-taking game, like Hearts, where you lose points for taking the wrong cards. There is also a card-fishing game, “Safarü”, and a set-collection game, “Rummü”.
Rook is perhaps the oldest non-traditional card deck. It was created by George S. Parker in 1906 so that Puritans whose religions forbade them from playing with traditional cards could enjoy the classic pursuit. It includes 4 colored suits with cards numbered 1-14, plus a Rook card instead of a Joker.
“Rook” itself is a trick-taking game similar to Bridge. Variants include “Dixie”, “The Red 1”, and others. “Club” is a partnership set-collection game while “Golden ‘10’” is a reverse-trick-taking game.
Because Rook has been out for a hundred years, there are many more games, many of them created traditionally.
Space Dominoes is a curious set of cards where each card is broken into three parts, with part having a color (red, blue, or yellow) and a value from 0-3. So one card might show: yellow-1/yellow-1/red-3. Just like a domino, but with three parts.
This small publication includes three different games: a simple card matching game called “Space Dominoes”, a solitaire game called “Solar Solitaire”, and a memory game called “Cosmic Concentration”.
Author’s Note: I played a lot more of these semi-traditional card games in my early years in the eurohobby than I do now. Back then Coloretto and King’s Breakfast were almost always in my game bag, for when we were waiting for someone to show up. I don’t know if I play less of them now because I’m deeper into the hobby or because of the rise of super-fillers like Race for the Galaxy and 7 Wonders, which pack a lot more game into a little time. In any case Havoc: the Hundred Year’s War still gets very frequent play. My other top card games are probably Money, Fairy Tale, No Thanks, and Gold! — which are much less traditional, though they may all fit into the broad set-collection category.
When Knucklebones published this article, they cut my discussion of value climbing games, card matching games, and card fishing games. I then published that “lost” content here on November 9th, when the print magazine was published. Instead you get all the material as it was originally intended (and I’ve just omitted that now-repetitive November 9th blog entry). —SA, 8/16/12
