Games of a cartile nature

[coldforge]

I'm reading up on Truco and it sounds like a great deal of fun. I'm especially liking what I'm reading about the bluffing aspect of it.

Yeah, the bluffing is a huge part of it, just because the betting structure is so fluid. That said, I really have no interest in the like, exploit speech errors part of the game, like, 'Retruco.' 'You can't retruco, it's not your turn.' 'You said "retruco"!!!! Don't mind if I do!!'

[coldforge]

Let the record show that Nick Ink has thoroughly beaten me at Clobyosh today. He was too sporting to tally up exactly how badly, but I would put him at nearly 550 to my low 414 or so.

[Nick Ink]

In fairness, I had Greg ply him with beverages and sweetmeats beforehand though, so that he was sufficiently woozy when the time came to crush him like a bug.

[Good Intentions]

Woah, woah, when next either of you want an online clobyosh game, count me in. If we can manage something between the timezones.

[coldforge]

I have learned how to play euchre. I am at the novice's point where it is fun and I'm not bad at it, but I can't see any potential for long term enjoyment. No doubt there's lots, but I can't see it yet.

[YojimboMonkey]

the fun is all in the smack talk.  But you can get that doing anything pretty much. 

[auto-da-fey]

oh man, throw in some marijuana and ragingly unsubtle hints to partners to pick it up, locate it in a midwestern basement, and you have every single sunday of 1995-96 until 120 minutes came on for me.

don't think i've played euchre since then, so probably right on the long term enjoyment.

[G.C.R]

My grandmother taught me euchre. And how to make massive, ridiculous risks like making trumps on the basis of a queen and a ten or such and such. Its a great game. Do you play 500 as well? thats like euchre with balls

[coldforge]

I don't though I've seen it mentioned in relation. I have a bias against card games named after numbers. (Except cuarenta)

[elpollodiablo]

I recently turned $5 into $75 playing internet poker

!!

That's like the best run of poker I've ever had excepting that time I went to Vegas

[coldforge]

Ugh speaking of cuarenta, just got stomped for forty minutes. I think fishing games have the potential to be the cruelest games in the hand of a skilled opponent.

[elpollodiablo]

Do you use some non-specific card playing client?

[coldforge]

Sometimes, yeah. There's VASSAL and Wildcard (latter OS X only). But a lot of games, including cuarenta, actually have flash versions, though often not in English, and a lot have downloadable versions too.

[coldforge]

http://www.pagat.com/fishing/mitaines.html

who will play this with me

[coldforge]

Shit, I forgot about mitaines! I still can't tell if that game is brilliant or desperately retarded. But it's called... mitaines.

I thought I should provide an update. Pollo has left New York City, which means my weekly card game is down one man. We're bringing in a couple new guys, and we'll see who sticks around. We've spent the last many happy months playing clobyosh exclusively, so I thought now that a new chapter is beginning, we might change up the games too. I brought back one old favorite and introduced one new one: Truco and Agurk, respectively.

Truco, as has been noted, is a trick taking game with relatively simple play mechanics and a pretty wide-open betting structure. The whole point is finding ways to 'make it interesting' in every hand. I've softened towards the speech error parts; the whole 'You can't retruco' thing is still kind of eh, but my partner said at one point, 'Am I allowed to real envido here?' and what can you say to that but, 'you just did?'

Agurk is a very simple game that I've been playing against the computer for a while now by myself. It falls near mitaines in the retarded-or-brilliant scale—it's *incredibly* simple, such that the act of learning the game is primarily the act of learning whether it's a very simple game upon which a vast and subtle strategic sense is woven, or whether it's just good dumb fun. Anyway, it's a game where people lose and drop out one-by-one, so round-buying is nearly built in. It can also support a lot of players, which is always a good thing to have in your pocket.

I'm going back and forth on whether I should introduce 66/Schnapsen. The same for Schafkopf.

[clare]

All those mittens gloves and socks had me highly amused. Reminds me slightly of a game that a bunch of us made up when we were 16 which we called Sodomy (as you do when you're 16) and has some complicated plays involving multiple discard piles.

[Thermofusion]

I kind of stopped going to my game group for no real reason (laziness, I suppose), so I haven't played a proper card game in a while. Unless the occasional online round of Tichu or Lost Cities counts.

[jm]

the fun is all in the smack talk.  But you can get that doing anything pretty much. 

This is totally true.  I was all about the "friendly" euchre tournaments back in the day.  The high school day.

[coldforge]

I think I was slightly harsh on euchre. It's not as deep as most of the Jass games. But it's a fun basis for drunken yelling, and that's my only real criterion.

[jm]

Yeah, I mean, I can echo what adf said about the "haven't played it since high school, so maybe not so much with the long-term enjoyment", but it's definitely a fun thing to do with a bunch of other people who like to be good-natured mean to each other.  Especially if you're talking about enough people to get multiple teams going, and therefore: tournaments.  Because it's almost not worth it to play just one game.

[coldforge]

Man, I really do love new games. My compatriots are understandably somewhat more inclined to a game that they know and might even be good at already, but I love learning new ones and then playing them out. Whenever I learn a new card game, my mind is abuzz for some time afterwards.

[jm]

I want to learn some new card games.

[coldforge]

[kyle]

My family in Tennessee would play Rook at any moment that conversation had lulled. Another trick taking, trump setting type of card game.

If anyone reads that article, we played Partnership Rules, using the whole deck, with the nest, and the 13 card, not the 14, was worth 10 points.

[alex]

coldforge, or whoever: a friend of mine taught us a card game today but wasn't sure whether she remembered it right. Couldn't look it up because we have no idea what it's called. The gist goes something like this:

In the first round, everyone gets 10 cards, looks at their own cards, and predicts how many tricks they'd win. The next person does the same, and so on - until only one person has to make their prediction, who is allowed to say anything except the number that would actually make things add up to 10  (so with three people, if the first person said 3, the second said 4, the third one is allowed to say anything except 3). Then the round is actually played, and at the end, everyone gets one point for each trick they won, and two points if their prediction turned out correctly. They lose two points for each trick that their prediction was off (so if they predicted 2 but won 3, they get three points for what they won, but lose two for being off by one trick, so 1 point overall). In the next round, the same is repeated but with only nine cards (where the predictions are allowed to add up to anything except nine), then with eight, and so on. When the game is down to one card per person, everyone has to make their prediction without actually seeing their own card, but they do get to see everyone else's cards. Then the game goes back to 2, 3, 4 cards, all the way back to ten.

Any idea what this game - or a game that is kinda like this, because we might have played it wrong - is called? It's kind of stupid, but lots of fun.

If that description makes no sense at all, I can try again when I'm sober.