fenchurch: (Shot First)
[personal profile] fenchurch
Oh mighty friendslist, omniscient group-mind that you are! I have a bit of a puzzle that I'm hoping you can help me solve...

Recently, my husband's aunt started teaching the rest of the family this fun new card game... and she called it Euchre. A few days later, [livejournal.com profile] rackham and I went to our Hoyle's Book of Card Games to make sure we were remembering the rules right, only to discover that the Euchre described in the book bore absolutely no similarity to the game we've been playing. The aunt says she learned the game from a retired couple at her church, who had in turn learned it from an elderly couple from Finland they had met while on a cruise. How is that for convoluted?

Here are the rules as I remember them...

Combine two decks (this may be a rule applied to the number of people playing, since we've always played with five or more people), shuffle and deal out six cards to each player. The cards remain face down to start and are placed in two rows of three like this:

X X X
X X X

The players then choose any two of the cards in front of them to turn face up before play starts.

Points are face value except for Jacks (which are -1), Queens (which are 10) and Kings (which are 0). Having two cards of the same value will cancel each other out, except for Jacks (so two 9's would equal zero, but two Jacks would equal -2). The goal is to have the least amount of points at the end of the round... with the game ending after the first person reaches 100 and the winner being the person with the fewest points at that time.

Play goes clockwise... and players can take either the top card on the discard pile or the top card on the main pile then replace any card in front of them (whether it's face down or up -- if it was face down, the new card is still placed face up) or simply discard the card they have drawn. When someone finally turns all their cards face up, play proceeds one last time around the table, giving everyone a chance try to get rid of any high point cards.

The other twist to gameplay is that if you get four of the same card in a square, like this:

X 9 9
X 9 9

Then everyone else automatically gets 40 points, in addition to whatever points they might earn for the round.

So, great and wise friendslist, does this sound familiar to anyone? I would love to know what the game is actually called... not that it really matters, since we'll keep playing it anyway, but it seems a bit wrong to keep calling it Euchre when that appears to be a completely different game.

Date: 2008-09-01 07:39 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nmissi.livejournal.com
Whatever that is, it ain't Euchre. Looks fun, though.

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