The great thing about Cribbage is that once you get into it, you learn how to set traps, how to foil them, how to turn a trap on the other player, how to exploit that…the strategy is pretty intense. Sure, there are going to be games where one person (or team) has all the cards, but more often than not pure skill wins.
Bullshit and asshole can’t really be played with 2 people because you know exactly what the other person has. for 2 players it doesn’t get much better than speed.
I didn’t realize Cribbage was so highly thought-of… I’ll have to relearn it.
My choice for 4 players has always been pinochle, but I guess that’s a 48-card deck.
Has anyone ever played 2-handed whist? It’s fantastic, my favorite two-player card game (with a standard deck). All the cards are dealt but a quarter of them start visible and another quarter of them are invisible to both players because they are covered by the visible ones. (They become visible once the originally visible cards are played.) The open information makes the trick-taking mechanic quite, er, tricky.
However, I have always been curious about the game because I learned it from my Dad, and I have never seen anyone play this game anywhere… [I go visit Wikipedia] …holy smokes, it’s called Minnesota Whist or Norwegian Whist, which is apt because my Dad is from South Dakota and his father was Norwegian! How interesting to find a bit of my family’s history in the games handed down to me. The Wikipedia article still has no reference to the two-handed game, which makes me quite curious where that developed exactly…
Asshole and it’s variants are great games for 4+ people.
For just 2 people my wife and I play Golf and Gin. You could put together a deck for Lost Cities (an excellent two player game) using two decks of regular cards though it’s non-trivial (basically you need 5 suits). A great, fairly cheap game that scales to 2 players is Reiner Knizia’s Razzia. My wife and I have played a LOT of that together.
Yea, we own the Lost Cities card game and I remember thinking “Hey, I just paid $20 for a game I could recreate with a deck of playing cards…” when I got it home and played a few rounds.
It’s a fun (but absolutely torturous at times) game for me and my wife. I say Torturous because I have a hard time laying cards down that I’m not prepared to build on if I don’t have matching suits in my hand already.
Pitch can be played with 2-7 people.
$205 for Lost Cities?!
One of those numbers does not belong.
This, yes. Its like the hidden national past time of the Midwest. Though it really is a four player game and you only need half of that 52 card deck (9-A). It’s appeal is that it plays quickly, encourages cross table banter, doesn’t require a lot of space, forces players to consider different risk/reward trade-offs, and the “culture” that surrounds it. Once you have the perfect hand for a loner only to have your partner call a suit from the color you don’t got… you’ll be part of a cultural group joined and united by a common experience. Sort of like veterans. And people who were alive when Kennedy was shot.
Euchre is sheepshead for people who can’t handle complexity.
Pshaw. Euchre is a fun card game and a great way to past the time, even with complete strangers. And its relatively easy to learn how to play. A friend of the family actually had a Euchre tournament at his wedding reception.
True - I just have no fun with 2 people. Partners is the best way to play it.
If you really like Euchre that much, you should try 500. It’s fairly similar, but it’s just a better game, in my opinion.
30+ posts and no one mentioned gin rummy? Tonk is a great variant to gin, I played it a lot while growing up.
My favorite 4-player card game is Tichu. It takes 56 cards to play, but it basically is just a standard 52-card deck with 4 extras added in (I’ve done this by just using the jokers/rules cards they typically include). The game is a bit like a cross between Spades, Poker, and Asshole.
I haven’t played it for 20 years, but Piquet is a great game. OK, it’s not technically a standard deck, but you make a short deck by taking out the 2-6 cards, so not a big deal.
3-13 is about the easiest (while still fun!) card game you can play!
http://www.pagat.com/rummy/3-13.html
My dad would play what he called “Zein Check” with his sister and parents all the time as a kid/young adult in the '50s, and he taught it to me. No one else I’ve ever met knows what I’m talking about when I mention it.
A little Googling reveals it’s really Zion Check. The Wikipedia article on it is fairly accurate in describing its rules:
Unlike the article, I always played where players were dealt 10 cards in each hand. Players could buy cards that others discarded in order to meet the card requirements of later hands. The dealer of each hand also flipped over the top card creating the discard pile, so there was no “going twice” that the article describes.
Edited P.S.: This is a 2-deck game. It can be played with Jokers. I would always just call something wild in Jokers’ place.
Euchre is fine, but if you’re used to playing sheepshead, it’s just a thin game. Sheepshead is a trick-taking game with trump, like euchre, but it adds some interesting elements:
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After the deal, cards are left in the blind, and you can choose to take the blind or not. Taking the blind generally makes it harder to win (but gives bigger rewards if you do win, if you’re playing for money), so there’s a calculation about whether your hand is good enough to pick up the blind with.
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Whoever picks up the blind is partnered with whoever has the jack of diamonds. So there’s this interesting co-op traitor element, where the picker knows that someone is their ally, but doesn’t know who, and all the other players know that one of them is secretly working with the picker, but aren’t sure who it is; only one person in the game (the partner) knows who everyone is.
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Cards have point values. So a lot of times there are tricks that you can easily take, but you have to decide if it’s worth it. You need 60 points to win the game, so if there’s an 8 point trick on the table, is it worth using the highest card to take it, or should you hold out for something better?
It all adds a lot to the game, to the point where sheepshead has the complexity of a Eurogame with the wide accessibility of a straight card deck.
2 Player pitch is best played against someone you truly loathe. I agree that 4 player pitch is the best way to play it, though 4 player cutthroat is interesting sometimes too.
I’m more of a dice man, really. Cards are more working tools for magic, although do I enjoy a good game of cheat of an evening.
Ah yes, Tichu is another favorite. We played it at lunch daily for about a year and it never got stale. The official Tichu deck is more attractive, but with four other cards, as mentioned, you can play it with a standard deck more cheaply. It is a partnership game, like bridge, but with elements of pseudo-solo play as well as communication with partners via cards played. Fantastic game.