Card game guides

Almost every classic card game has a dozen house variants, and the disagreements are never about the fun part. They are about how many cards you pass, whether the deck is trimmed for an odd number of players, what happens when somebody shoots the moon, and who leads the first trick. Those details decide games. A guide that glosses over them is a guide you have to stop reading the moment a hand goes strangely.

So these pages are specific. Where a rule has a choice in it, the choice we made is stated, and usually the reason too. Where a number matters — points per card, the target score, how far down the table still scores on the global leaderboard — the number is in a table you can check mid-hand rather than buried in a paragraph.

The games

• Hearts
  Three to five players, a trimmed deck when it has to be, passing that rotates, and the one play that turns the whole scoring upside down.
• Callbreak
  Call your tricks then take exactly that many — spades are always trump, and finishing two over your call costs what falling short does.
• Wortblitz
  A quick German quiz for study groups, A1 to C2: everyone answers the same word at once, then learns it together.
• Twenty-Nine (29)
  A four-player partnership game where the Jack outranks the Ace, the trump stays secret until somebody asks, and the hand is worth exactly 29.
• Texas Hold'em
  Two cards of your own and five in the middle, four rounds of betting, and the ten hand rankings in order. Play money only.
• Colour Match
  Shed your hand by colour or number, survive everyone else's draw cards, and decide whether your table stacks them.
• Don't Draw That
  Every turn ends by drawing a card, some of them are bombs, and almost every other card exists to move that risk onto somebody else.

How the global leaderboard scores a match

Every finished match also feeds a per-game ranking. Only the result counts — never the score inside the game — so a narrow win is worth exactly what a runaway one is. What does change the value of a win is the size of the table you won at, because beating four people is not the same achievement as beating two.

Each game's guide carries its own scoring table. Two boards are kept: this week, and all time. You need three matches to appear on the weekly board and five on all time, so nobody tops a board on the strength of one lucky game, and level on points the player who got there in fewer matches ranks higher.