Card Games: Miscellaneous Games

If my classification of card games by mechanism were perfect, there would perhaps be no games in this category. In practice it is inevitable that games will show up which do not fit into a pre-existing scheme. Traditional games which do not seem to fit elsewhere will be collected here, in the hope that it will eventually become clear how they can best be incorporated into existing or new groups of games.

• Poker Bull, a game of bluff.
• GOPS or Goofenspiel, a game of bluff and strategy.
• Speculation, a 19th century auction and trading game.
• One-Eyed Jack, a game in which cards are played to place counters on a board made from another deck of playing-cards.
• Pelmanism, a memory game in which players match pairs of cards.
• Ribs, a game of double tricks in which players bid before each trick according to what cards they expect to win from the other players.
• Democracy, a sort of trick taking game in which cards are played simultaneously and the aim is to take the majority of points in a suit.
• Mate, a two-player game of perfect information invented in Germany in the early 20th century.
• Dingo, a four-player hunting game in which players score for matching the current rabbit card (diamond) with a dingo (heart) or wolf (black card) of the same rank.

I include here a couple of activities using playing-cards which are not really games at all in the usual sense:

• Three Card Monte (also known as "Find the Lady" or "Bonneteau")
• 52 Card Pickup

People who invent new card games using traditional or special cards sometimes deliberately strive for originality, creating new types of game mechanism. These games will be found in other parts of the web site:

• The Invented Games section is for games played with various types of traditional cards.
• The Commercial Games section is for propietory games that require a special pack of cards made specially for that game.