Which shed?

[davidn]

It looks rather like this, but less Windowsy

A few years before the senior honours project that would ensure that I never wanted to see another pack of cards ever again, we used to constantly play a card game that I always knew as Shed in the sixth year common room. The aim of the game is to shed three layers of cards - in hand, face up and face down - and take it in turns with other players to build up a pile of cards (building a shed, I suppose) in the middle of the table, increasing the size and value of it gradually while trying to avoid getting into a situation where you're unable to play and therefore have to be the one to pick up the pile. Certain cards, called powercards, could be played no matter what the pile's current value was and had special effects such as reducing the required value of the pile to 2 or reversing the order of play.

What's most interesting about the game is its heavily memetic nature - when I went to university the next year, it seemed that everybody I met knew the game (though never under the same name), but despite always sticking to that set of core rules, every single school group had its own unique idea of just how many powercards there were, the values to which they were assigned and the effect of each one. To be able to play it with any new group of people, we had to first agree on a cobbled-together combination of the rules that we'd brought from our own respective territories, which we would then bring back and introduce when we went back to visit home again, thus spreading individual rules gradually throughout the world. I'm trying to dance around the uncanny similarity of this to how Triple Triad worked, but that had exactly the same idea.

The Wikipedia article on it lists a variety of weird and wonderful effects and conditions, some of which I'm familiar with through picking them up from other students from across the country. But my "home" Inverurie Academy powercards were as follows:

2 - The value of the pile returns to 2
7 - Transparent card, takes the value of the first non-7 card below it
10 - Burn the shed! The cards in the pile are taken out of the game
Ace - Nominate the next player to put down a card, and play continues from them

I'm interested to know just how many variants are represented by my Friends list. What were your rules?

Comments

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

Okay, starting close to "home", here's the Alford Academy version, which was known as Shit Heads, or Pyramids:

2 - next player misses a turn
3 - transparent card
7 - next card has to be equal-or-lower, rather than the usual equal-or-higher (reverts back to normal play after someone puts down a lower card)
10 - burn card
Ace - highest card, but also the reset

There was another card that could be used to make someone else pick up all the previously played cards, and although I think it was the Jack, I wouldn't put money on it.

Speaking of gambling, were you allowed to have cards at school? They're supposed to be banned in all Aberdeenshire schools because they "encourage gambling", and the official rule at Alford was that teachers should confiscate them on sight put the owner/players on detention, but it wasn't always enforced because not many teachers want to spend their lunch break supervising detentions for pupils caught engaging in a quiet and harmless activity.

[davidn]

Interesting to see some rules I knew about on cards that I've never seen have them! I think the "lower card on 7" rule was one I brought back from St Andrews - it may have been you :)

And - what?! That's shocking. We had no rules against cards, because I like to think that I was a member of the very last part of the generation before the world turned flaming mental. However, poker was also a common room activity, first with a heap of assorted Kinder Egg prizes that had been collecting on the windowsill, and then we graduated to going down to the bank and getting £1 bags of copper coins to use those as our chips. Ingeniously the players always made sure to have the charity box on the table, so if an emergency arose and the teacher wandered in unexpectedly they could hide the cards and pretend they were just counting out its contents.