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

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

The RGC version was again just "Shithead"

There was also the rule that if all four cards of a certain value were played on top of each other, they (and maybe everything below) was burnt. Also, you could play multiple cards of the same value.

2 - Reset to 2
3 - Most powerful card. Is instantly burned after that round of play ends - you can never pick up the three. The only way one could avoid picking up the stack after a three aws played was by playing another 3, an 8, or a 10.
8 - invisible card.
9 - 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) [I'm pretty sure you couldnt play this on a 3, but otherwise at any time.]
10 - burn card

I've played a couple of variants, including with "change direction of play" and "miss a turn", and I'm sure I've missed at least one from these rules, and this may be an amalgam...


We actually stopped playing this, and moved onto Egyptian Monkeyspank" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Ratscrew), which roughly resembled a violent combination of snap and beggar-my-neighbour, with some more insane rules. The fact that a pair with another card between was treated the same as a pair made for a lot of fun.

[davidn]

We had those multiple-card and burn rules as well - I think that they're part of the base rules that aren't changed, but given the way that absolutely everything else in the game seems fluid...

10 seems so far to be consistently the burn card, and I can't remember any version that didn't have it. I see you also had the "reset to 2" rule for 2, but I think you're the first variant I've heard of to have nothing on the 7 (moving the rule that I was familiar with to the 8 and the one that I later picked up to the 9). I think that I'd seen the "change direction" rule on the 7 as well.

Slightly worryingly, remembering about this game and hearing about other people's rules is making me think that studying a memetic card game with rules originating and spreading throughout different regions would have been a great senior honours project as well...

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

I think 7 may've switched direction or missed a turn. Not 100% sure...