Barry Rigal - Card Games For Dummies

If you call out a name at the wrong moment, you concede all your played cards to the player with the animal (or animal noise) you call out. Making the wrong call or naming the wrong animal at the appropriate moment costs you nothing but loss, because the other player is likely to beat you to the punch.

Slapjack involves physical agility rather than verbal dexterity and memory, so make sure the players involved are active and eager. Young children can play this game if they can tell the difference between a jack and a king or queen.

Assemble the following items to play Slapjack:

Two or more players. A maximum of six is probably sensible or too many collisions may result at home plate.

A standard deck of 52 cards: Slapjack can totally wreck a deck of cards, so don’t break out the collector cards you bought in Las Vegas.

The dealer deals out the entire deck, face-down and one card at a time, to each player in a clockwise rotation. At the end of the deal, each player should have a neat stack of cards in front of them. Make sure you don’t look at your cards.

Beginning on the dealer’s left, each player takes a turn playing a card face-up onto a single stack in the center of the table.

Play continues peacefully until someone plays a jack. Whoever slaps the jack first wins all the cards in the middle of the table and adds them to the bottom of the pile in front of them. The player to the slapper’s left starts the next pile by placing a card face-up in the center of the table.

Spirits run high in Slapjack, so you may need to define some rules before the game starts:

You turn over a card by turning it away from you so that you can’t peek at it in advance. (This puts the turner at a slight disadvantage, but the luck evens out things eventually.)

Rest your slapping hand on the table. Make the player who puts out the card slap with their other hand, which must also rest on the table.

When you can’t decide who slapped first, the hand closest to the jack always wins the day.

If you slap the wrong card, you must give a card from your face-down pile to the person who played the card you slapped.

After all your cards are gone, you aren’t automatically out of the game; you stay in for one more chance, lying in ambush and waiting to slap the next jack that gets turned over. At that point, if you fail to slap the jack, you’re out. The first player to get all the cards wins.

War is a great game for young children. The object is to acquire all the cards, which you can do in different ways.

To play War, you need the following:

Two players

A standard deck of 52 cards

Start by dealing out the deck one card at a time, face-down, so that each player gets 26 cards. Keep your cards in a pile and don’t look at them. Each player turns over one card simultaneously; whoever turns over the highest card picks up the two cards and puts them face-down at the bottom of their pile.

The cards have the normal rank from highest to lowest: ace, king, queen, jack, and then 10 through 2 (see Chapter 1for card-playing basics).

The game continues in this manner until both players turn over a card of the same rank, at which point you enter a war. A war can progress in one of three ways. I start with the most benevolent version and work my way to the most brutal:

Each player puts a card face-down on top of the tied card and then one face-up. Whoever has the higher face-up card takes all six cards.

Each player puts three face-down cards on the table and one face-up card, so the competition is for ten cards. This option speeds up the game, which often drags a little — especially for children!

Each player puts down cards depending on the rank of the tied cards. If the equal cards are 7s, you each count off seven face-down cards before turning a card over. If the equal cards are kings, queens, or jacks, you turn down ten cards before flipping one up and squaring off. For an ace, count out 11 face-down cards.

If another tie results, repeat the process until someone achieves a decisive victory.

If a player runs out of cards in the middle of a war, you have two possible solutions: You lose the war and are out of the game, or you turn your last card face up, and these count as your played card in the war.

Whoever wins the cards gathers them up and puts them at the bottom of their pile. The first person to get all the other player’s cards wins.

You can play War with three players. The dealer gives out 17 cards to each player, face-down. The remaining card goes to the winner of the first war. The players simultaneously flip over one card each. The highest card of the three takes all three cards. If two players tie for the high card, they each place three cards face-down and then place one face-up, and the highest card collects all the cards in the pile. If you have another draw at this point, you fight another war. If all three players turn over the same card, a double war takes place; each player turns down six cards and flips one up, and the winner takes all.

The Fish family features two games: Go Fish and Authors. Both games have the same aim: Each player tries to make as many complete sets of four of a kind as possible.

Get out yer fishin’ pole and head to the waterin’ hole — you’re about to go fishin’ fer sets (four cards of the same kind).

To play Go Fish, you need the following:

At least three players

A standard deck of 52 cards

Each player gets ten cards from the dealer. You pretend as you deal out the full deck that you have one more player than you really do. With four players, for example, you deal out ten cards (one by one, face-down, in a clockwise rotation) in five piles. Add the two leftover cards to the pretend pile and leave those 12 cards as the stock in the middle of the table. With three players, you have three hands of 13 cards and a stock of the remaining 13.

Starting with the player to the left of the dealer, each player has the opportunity of asking any other player at the table a question. This must be in the form of “Do you have any Xs ?” (X is the rank of card; 4s or queens, for example.) The player asking the question must have at least one X to pose the question.

If the person asked has an X or two, they must hand them over, and the questioner’s turn continues. The questioner can then ask the same player or any other player if they have a card in a particular set. As soon as the questioner completes a set of four cards, they put the set down on the table in front of them and continue their turn.

The game becomes more difficult if the responder only has to provide one card from the relevant set, even if they have more than one queen, for example. The questioner has to ask again and risks wasting a turn.