Kings & Queens

(1999)

A card game for 2 players, playable with a deck of traditional playing cards.


rules

From a standard deck of playing cards, select the cards 2 to 5 and the King and Queen from each suit. Shuffle these cards together, discard the rest. Hence, you'll have a deck of only 24 cards.

playing a round

To start a game round, shuffle the cards and deal them in three stacks of 8 cards. The non-dealing player is the starting player. The dealing player and the starting player each get 8 cards, the other 8 cards are not used in this game round.

The starting player plays the first card. The other player has to follow suit. If she cannot, she can play any card. If the other player followed suit, then the player that played the highest card gets the 'trick' (i.e. the two cards just played) and puts them face down in front of her. If the other player did not follow suit, then the starting player gets the trick.

Card order is normal, except that 2 beats king. 3 is higher than 2, a Queen is higher than 5, and a King is higher than a Queen. All that is normal, but the 2 is a special card that is lower than every other card, but higher than the King.

The player who got the trick plays the next card and the other player answers. This is continued until all cards are played and are in face down stacks in front of the two players.

scoring

Only Kings and Queens are worth points. First count the total number of Kings and Queens (separately) in the face down cards held by the two players at the end of a game round. Then divide 12 by the number of Kings for the point value of individual King cards, and minus 12 by the number of Queens for the point value of individual Queen cards. (What's positive and what's negative does not matter in any way for the game, so if players prefer, they could count negative points for Kings and positive points for Queens, as long as they are consistent.) Thus, if there are 2 Kings in the game round and 3 Queens (and therefore, there are 2 more Kings and 1 more Queen in the 8 unused cards), then Kings are worth +6 points and Queens are worth -4 points. Both players count their points. Their scores normally add up to 0, but can also add up to -12 or +12 if there are no kings or no queens in that round, which is quite uncommon. (If the two scores do not add up to 0 (or -12 or +12) then at least one player made an error.)

Before any game round, but after seeing their cards, the players announce how many points they think that they will score in that round. The starting player goes first, the other player next. The two numbers may not add up to zero.

A player's score for a game round is the absolute difference between her predicted number of points and the number of points actually obtained.

a full game

After a round, write down those absolute differences between prediction and actual points (ignoring minus signs). This number is the round score for a player.

Shuffle all 24 cards back together. The starting player of the previous round is now the dealing player.

Continue playing rounds until the sum of the round scores of one player is or exceeds 50. The player with the lower sum of round scores wins the game. If they tie, which is very uncommon, play one more round to decide the winner.