Card games in Sudan

A page from the Great Lakes Folk Festival site included descriptions by Sallie Campbell of two games played by Sudanese refugees in Lansing, Michigan, USA.

The first is a domino game, played as described on the Partnership Dominoes page.

The second is "fourteen", a rummy game for 2-5 players with 14 cards dealt to each player from a double deck of 104 cards. Play is counter-clockwise. The first player needs sets and/or runs to a total value of at least 75 points for an initial meld, cards being worth face value, with pictures and aces worth 10. The aces of a suit chosen before the deal are wild. Other players can only meld when they can put down at least as many points as the first player who melded. Having melded , a player can lay off cards, and cannot discard a card that could have been laid off. The play ends when one player goes out; the others score penalty points for the cards remaining in their hands, with an extra 10-point penalty for a player who discarded a card that enabled the player taking it to go out. If the draw pile is exhausted, the hand ends with no score. A player who accumulates 46 or more penalty points is out of the game. At this point any player with 15 or fewer points is declared a winner. If no one has won, the scores are reset to zero and another player may replace the one who was eliminated.

Alexey Lobashev reports that another Sudanese card game Herik (meaning 'burning') is similar to 14 but with a few differences.

Shlla'at is an unusual fishing game in which a player who makes a capture draws a new card from the deck and takes another turn, and cards can be captured from the top of the opponents' capture piles.