Rules of Card Games: I Doubt It (1998)

I grew up playing a game we called &#x27;Pounce&#x27;. I&#x27;ve also heard it called &#x27;Nerts&quot;. In Pagat, it&#x27;s apparently classified as &#x27;Simultaneous Solitaire&#x27; and related to Klondike[0].<p>We played with as many as 12 players, all with a full deck of cards. All players set up similar to solitaire, with 13 cards in the &#x27;pounce pile&#x27;. The objective was to play all the cards in your pounce pile, using regular solitaire rules, but playing on any player&#x27;s foundation pile.<p>The game is very physical and intense. If two players can play the same card and there is one foundation pile qualified, they have to move fast. Hands collide, cards are bent, epithets hurled... It was common for players to leap to their feet, lurch across the table and body check their neighbor to play a card.<p>When a player exhausted their Pounce Pile, they&#x27;d holler &#x27;POUNCE&#x27; and everyone had to stop play and take their score: Sort and count your cards in the foundation piles, and subtract 2x the number of cards remaining in your pounce pile. First player to &#x27;X&#x27; (a pre-agreed threshold) wins.<p>In my life, I&#x27;ve never encountered another family who played this card game. Maybe you&#x27;re familiar with it?<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pagat.com&#x2F;patience&#x2F;double.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pagat.com&#x2F;patience&#x2F;double.html</a>

Man, Pagat.com is one of the true gems of the internet. I’ve been using it since I was a kid to learn games (and, more importantly, to win rules disputes while playing them). John McLeod deserves an award for compiling and maintaining such a compendious and well-organized project.

The variant of this game I have always played allows for playing multiple cards on your turn as part of a set, so 3 queens for example.<p>We also played with the general rule that you can do anything outside the rules and as long as you can get through your turn without anyone calling you out in it you&#x27;re in the clear. Playing more cards than you call is a pretty common cheat and it&#x27;s always pure chaos when it happens and gets called out.<p>It can be a real friendship stressor so you have to have the right group of players for it, but it&#x27;s always fun sharing the stupid cheats that people pulled off afterwards.

Pagat.com is great. I also discovered Ambition, a 4-player trick taking game I recommend highly, through it.<p>Ambition-- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pagat.com&#x2F;invented&#x2F;ambition.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pagat.com&#x2F;invented&#x2F;ambition.html</a>

Bluff is a good party game, I have played it many times with many different guests. If playing with many people use 2 decks instead of 1 and only the people sitting close to the current player can Challenge - otherwise there is always somebody that wants to challenge and the game does not progress.<p>Trick to winning (mostly) is to first bluff by playing your singles and then playing your real ones at the end of the round and try to make people think you bluff.<p>I agree that John McLeod deserves an award for his work.

We played a variant of this in Poland called &quot;Oszust&quot; (liar). Jokers were used and counted as any card.<p>Person who has 2 hears starts and plays it openly. Every other card is played covered.<p>You can play 1,3 or more cards at once (you can&#x27;t play 2). You can play cards of the same rank as the last person or 1 higher than the last person.<p>You can cheat by playing more or less cards than declared as well as lying about their ranks. At any time anyone can say &quot;oszust&quot; and check last played cards and either he or the person lying takes all cards except the first from the discard stack.<p>Also if you don&#x27;t play any cards in a given round - you have to take 1 card from the unused cards stack. If the stack of unused cards is empty you put all cards from the discard stack except the last into the unused cards stack and continue.<p>The player who has no cards wins. Then the rest continue for the 2nd, 3rd etc places. When 2 players remain they both are losers and the game ends.<p>We played this on every break at university, sometimes with double deck and 8 people playing. It&#x27;s great for bluffing and psychologic warfare.

I changed the year to 1998 per <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;*&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pagat.com&#x2F;beating&#x2F;doubt.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;*&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pagat.com&#x2F;beating&#x2F;...</a>, which is pretty cool to see.

I didn&#x27;t see this at pagat.com, but for the booklet of games one can play with Rook cards (including &quot;I Doubt It&quot; and maybe around 20 games total, curiously not all listed in its table of contents, but for a variety of ages &amp; difficulty levels) is at archive.org (dated 1924). I was relieved to find it, since the cards we purchased from Hasbro didn&#x27;t have this info.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;rook-instruction-manual-1924-images" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;rook-instruction-manual-1924-ima...</a>

Same game with dice <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dudo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dudo</a>

The way we played it, you had to put at least one card down on your turn. So, if you didn’t have any of that card, you had to bluff. You could put as many cards down as you wanted. You had to state how many cards you were adding to the stack.<p>It was funny when someone got called on their bluff, picked up the stack and looked at it, and then announced incredulously that everyone before them had been lying too.

Not a classic card game but Coup (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardgamegeek.com&#x2F;boardgame&#x2F;131357&#x2F;coup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardgamegeek.com&#x2F;boardgame&#x2F;131357&#x2F;coup</a>) is based on a similar mechanic of claiming what you&#x27;re playing and being called out but with more interestingly interacting card abilities. I thoroughly recommend it.

This is a great game. My wife&#x27;s family plays it. It&#x27;s funny to watch new players realize how cheat-y the game is.

This game was really fun until you figure out the insight that the card ranks you&#x27;ll need are known in advance just by counting off to your left. If I know I need an Ace, a 4, a 7, a 10, etc, I can plan the whole game around calling &quot;BS&quot; on the ranks I don&#x27;t have yet to pick up those needed cards.<p>At this point the game becomes like Tic Tac Toe :)