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

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

Again, Shithead. There was a version called Danish Bastards, but it was apparently shite so no one played it.

2s reset
7s are transparent by one card (2 7s would be a 7)
10s burn (as do 4 of a kind on top of each other)
As high

Also stuff like when you're playing your table cards at the end, you're only allowed to play one of any type (say you had two kings on the table, you're only allowed to play one at once), but if you can't play a card, you are allowed to "play" the card you have and pick it up with the rest of the pack.

[davidn]

That's the closest to my own set of rules yet, with just the nomination rule for the aces missing - which shouldn't be surprising given you were from Aberdeen, but the RGC rules above seem vastly different!

Now that you mention it, I'm not sure about the rule that I said above of the 7's transparency going down to the last card that wasn't a 7... it's entirely possible that it was just the previous card. Although I have a vague memory that the only time you would be laying on a 7 would be when the pile was burned because of four sevens, and the next player would have to lay on a non-existent 7 or pick up nothing.

I'm struggling to recall our rules for the table cards, too... I think we allowed matching cards to be played at once, and I think we allowed the play/pick up to hand rule on only the blind cards.

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

I'm not from Aberdeen, I just live here now. I went to high school in the Borders. I do miss my common room :P Did nothing but play Shithead and Spit all year.

[davidn]

In that case the rules similarity is a mystery - I had connected you firmly to Aberdeen in my head for some reason, I hadn't realized that you only moved there recently. I would have tried to get in contact again when we were visiting last week - though somehow we managed to avoid going into Aberdeen at all while we were there.

And that sounds exactly like our common room - card games and the continuing stereo war of metal versus pop. I was never much good at Spit, people could usually deal themselves to completion by the time I'd picked up my first card.

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that sounds like me. I was Spit Queen ;)

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

You had to lay on non-existant cards? We always had it that when a player burnt cards, she got to play the follow up with any card of his choice.

[davidn]

It does sound a bit unlikely to me as well, now I'm struggling to remember it... if it was in this case that I remember, that was the only situation where a non-existent card was kept - all other burns just cleared the pile entirely.