Skip to main content

It is raining!


081/365, originally uploaded by craigand.
This is a card game we picked up in Prague. Ostensibly a traditional game, it's pretty much a variant of any number of standard card games played with a 52 card deck, but with its own oddities.

There are 32 cards, with 8 cards in each suit. The suits are acorns, bells, hearts and leaves. Each contains 4 picture cards (king, queen, jack and serf, I think) and 4 number cards. The number cards, bizarrely, are the 7, 8, 9 and 10.

I used a spot of OCR and Google Translate magic to translate the instruction card from Czech to English. I don't think it worked very well. Here they are:

It's Raining

Number of players; 2-5
Goal of the game: the winner the player who first gets rid of all cards.

The course of the game, each will receive 4 cards. The rest remains on the table as a talon. The top card kitty turns and puts the middle stoiu, where a basis swap package. The game begins the player to the left of the dealer. Its task is to attach odio · woman card sheet of the same value or color. We do not have a corresponding tab, you can take advantage of special properties of the upper to change color. So he Earth as green nine trump Heart uppers. Then, you need to report the color of a superstructure. And even if we do not have any opportunity, we must gain a card from the talon. Then comes the next player. Exceptional cards: If someone Plot seven, then the next player must immediately take on two cards (but no one was allowed to drop from their cards). However, if the player is also seven, and can be used to force the opponent to take the next four cards at once. If you follow all four of the seven in a row, the last player to collect 8 cards. Another unique card is an ace in the game. If someone earns, the player has left after one round left out. The player who first gets rid of all the cards, announces it is raining.


So there you go. From what we can decipher, playing a 7 means pick up 2 cards, and playing an ace (which we decided meant the serf, although it's not clear) means miss a go. Otherwise, matching suit or value until you have none left. For such a simple game, it can last for ages!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fairy Lights

Street lights at night can be very pretty. For someone who lives close to the centre of a large city, skirting round the edge of the town centre can provide a host of beautiful views at night. One advantage to using a wide open lens when taking these pictures is the capture of bokeh, or creative blur. An extreme example is shown to your right; a mass of coloured circles that roughly represent the city they are part of. A more subtle example, of course, is in the picture of the day at the top of this post. The lights cluster around the top of the leaves like fireflies, obviously part of a cityscape but at the same time abstract. The extreme out of focus image is a blurred version of the picture on the left. A view over Sheffield from Pitsmoor, looking up Netherthorpe Road and up to the university. Even when the buildings are focussed (roughly; I'm still practicing) the lights take on the shape of the lens's aperture. I try to incorporate some foreground focus wh...
4 comments
Read more

In which I complain that coding standards are a waste of time

Just kidding. I'm not going to rail against coding standards. No, I'm going to rail against the absolute and dictatorial enforcement of coding style guidelines, to the point where a single misplaced curly bracket can fail the code review of a thousand line project before it's even started. I'm going to rail against the fact that many people these days don't actually know that coding style guidelines and coding standards are not the same thing. Coding style guidelines are not coding standards. Coding standards are rules on how to construct software. Rules that have practical and defined benefits. Rules than can be proven to assist in the structured and correct building of code. For example: Do not perform database access in the constructor. All database access should use the framework's DAL. Do not rely on complex instantiation instructions; provide a factory method. Do not inherit from a class in a different module or library; only encapsulate. Avoid sin...
2 comments
Read more

DeCSS on Ubuntu 9.10 and later

It used to be the case that enabling DVD playback on Ubuntu was a case of installing ubuntu-restricted-extras and that was that. Unfortunately DMCA nonsense in the US has buggered that up for all of us and so now there's an additional step. So, without further ado, here are the commands that need to be run at a command line: sudo apt-get install libdvdread4 sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh Voila! DVD playback a-la Ubuntu.
2 comments
Read more