Card Golf Part 1: Too Many Variations

When we reviewed Skyjo a few weeks ago, it reminded everyone of "Nine Cards Down", which we reviewed 5 years ago.

This weekend, we tried out the rules for Nine Cards Down that I gathered for that old post.  Back then, we played it and it felt fine.  Today we played it and it was lifeless and dull.  What happened?

I followed the links from my previous post and found that this family of "golf" card games is enormous, and you can skip from one page to another saying "some people score this way" and "other people do this instead."  I'm not sure there is anything even close to a standard game here.

The basic rules (from last time) are:
You start by dealing 9 cards to each player, and the players make a 3x3 grid of cards without ever looking at them.  Each player flips over two of their cards face up.

The most basic scoring is: A = 1, 2-10= face value, J & Q = 10 and K = 0.  Skip jokers for now.

The turns are simple: pick a card from the deck or the top of the discard pile, and use it to replace any of your cards, discarding the replaced card.  You do not get to look at a face-down card before replacing it.  Or discard the new card if you don't want it.  If you get three matching cards in a column, you can remove those -- they count as zero.  That's pretty much it.  As soon as someone shows their last card, other players get one last round to make their own plays, then score the hand.

Today, it was so boring, we were confused.  We played with three players and a single deck of cards that last time, so getting three of a kind in such a limited number of draws was unlikely.  Maybe it's only dull with two players and a single deck?  Would two decks be more fun?  We mostly drew crap cards, discarded them and flipped up cards because there was nothing better to do, so each hand was over in only 10 or 11 draws.

We were so frustrated we tried a crazy made-up version where you keep playing until the entire stock of cards is used up.  This got pretty funny, because we each ended up very low-scoring layouts, only to have to keep substituting the last 8-10 junk cards at the end, making our hands worse.  That did not make it better.

Minor scoring variations are everywhere: maybe a 2 is worth -2, but Riffle Shuffle & Roll recommended that 2s are still worth 2 but 5s should be worth -5.  I don't see how that would affect the game much.  Video here.

Here's another version from Play Together Games.

From this endless mess of variations, one said that you don't zero out three-of-a-kind columns, you cancel any adjacent pair of matching cards ... though even that got broken down further: some say a three-of-a-kind then only counts the one pair and the other card is left out, where others argue that the three-of-a-kind counts as two separate pairs.  I need to do a face palm here.

The next logical step from there is: a 2x2 block of all the same card is counted as -10 points.  So of course another page says that's worth -25 instead.

The "golf" part comes from playing 9 or 18 hands, and the lowest score at the point is the winner.

As for variations ... there are 4-card, 6-card, 8-card, 9-card and 10-card variations ... and Skyjo is basically a 12-card variation with custom cards.

We played a few hands of 6-card golf, and found it to be a lot more playable with two players and one deck.  The hands went quickly, and it was so much easier to get pairs of cards in the columns to cancel out, so you felt like you were actually building a pattern and making moves, not just flipping cards for no reason.

Again, this site gives an idea of the insane range of variations, and the Wikipedia page has about the same level of indecisiveness.  Does thing have any actual, reliable rules at all?

Many of the game versions were memory games where you don't turn up any cards until someone knocks and there is a final reveal.  Memory games are not our thing, but they're out there.

If ever there was a game that's made entirely of house rules, here you go.

Here is the BoardGameGeek forum of variants, sure to only get longer as more people contribute.

And I will end tonight's rant with an essay  from CardaNoir about strategy and why these game should be in every gamer's rotation. Nine Card Golf and Six Card Golf.

For an upcoming adventure, we went looking for app versions of these games for Android, because apps tend to use core rules as opposed to wild variations.  Maybe the answers are there.