Janet and Fred's Card Dominos

Devised whilst one table played dominos and another played regular card games. Supports two or three players per deck of cards (we hypothesise that multiple decks can be played together, to support N players, but not experimentally tested, yet). No betting rules devised yet, but it's intended to be played by penniless and possibly less than sober mountaineers.

Setup

Deal 10 cards to each player. Leave the remaining cards in a pile face down. Take two cards off the top of the deck and turn them over to start two stacks. Player to the right of the dealer (clockwise) starts.

Play

The objective is to get rid of all your cards. On each turn, a player either:

• places a card with one value higher (e.g. 9 on 8, Q on J) on one of the stacks, and any other card on the other stack; or
• if no cards can be played [or if the player chooses not to play a card], two more are taken from the remaining deck

Wildcards

The aces are wild, meaning that it can be played on top of any card (we pondered about disallowing ace on ace, but untested as yet). As the objective is to get rid of all your cards, it's probably wise to hang on to aces (you can opt to pick-up two more cards instead of playing an ace).

Analysis

So far two of us have played around 7 hands succesfully, and three of us a couple of hands (before more beer and coversation took over). The rules are pretty simple, yet the game turned out to be pretty engaging. As well as luck there's strategy -- if you witness another player picking up cards from the deck, it might be that they can't play anything, or that they've got an ace or two and are hanging onto it. Assuming that aces can be played on aces, you can effectively win the game with an ace plus any other card.

Playing two kings (one of which must be played on a queen) is not necessarily a wise idea -- it may well stuff the opposition, but it might stuff you next time around.

The game may also end if the deck ends up empty and no player got rid of all their cards yet. We didn't run into this in practice yet (aces will tend to go down last).

Optional extras

Here are some extra rules which we thought about while playing, but never tried out yet:

• not allowing an ace to be played on an ace, meaning that if someone puts down two aces (probably silly unless they're about to win), the next player would have to play a 2 or pick up from the deck.
• when someone in the room does something noteworthy, change the increment-by-one rule to decrement-by-one (e.g. king on an ace, 8 on a 9). And back to increment on the next social interlude.
• not allowing an ace to be played on a two, making the end-game a little more interesting (though we've not tried this one out yet!)