My favorite card came discovery in adult life was the climbing genre. Haggis, Tichu, Dou Dizhu
My second was learning about Cuttle and the timing of it/Magic the Gathering
When I do play Tichu these days, it's actually with the designer of Haggis, Sean Ross. He's been putting out a lot of traditionally inspired games over the past few years. He just published a game called Bacon which is a climbing game based on the traditional climbing game Guan Dan (https://www.pagat.com/climbing/guan_dan.html). I'd recommend checking out both games! The hand size in Guan Dan is 27 cards, and that's not even the most in a traditional climbing game!
An updated version of Haggis will also be coming out later this year, and it will support playing up to 6 players. The 4-player partnership version is particularly good. The reprint will also include some updated rules for the 3-player game, which I like a lot too.
(I'd give you some BGG links, but it looks like it's currently down for maintenance.)
That aside, Pagat is truly a gem. One of the best sites on the internet. I have spent hours and hours there learning and trying obscure card games. Thank you, John McLeod.
something i like about my copies of the original printing are the little rule/scoring cards that were great to hand to friends learning. i would love to pick up reprints
mcleod++ thanks for the info
Side note: Kind of funny that the site has Deutsch and English language options, but the cookie notice is in Italian. Anyone know why that is?
I don't know why that is, but it's on purpose. They are using cookieconsent2 from NPM but overrode the message strings.
https://www.pagat.com/kt5/rook.html
https://archive.org/details/rook-instruction-manual-1924-ima... (This actually has rules for more games than are found in its own table of contents.)
There are many, for different ages and effort levels. (And with minimal adaptation, the same cards can be used for games normally associated with standard playing card decks, or "go fish" for children, or whatever.)
People who are willing to spend time to learn a game usually "converge" on games where there's a large community, and pretty much every popular game under the sun that's in the public domain has been implemented over and over.
Edit: How you're holding and dealing the cards is quite literally part of the game. You can read people by how they fling the cards when dealing or how they rearrange in their hands, etc. It's meant to be a tactile experience. It's part of the fun. Yes of course you can play whatever you want online. Call me old fashioned, but 5 dudes at a table playing cards on their phone just grosses me out.
It might well gross _you_ out, but that doesn't make it wrong. Some people socialize in different ways from you, and that's ok.
Similarly if you play a pack for a while and notice a particular card has a scruff or bend on it. Definitely had that while playing with a friends Uno deck.
Fun times…
But I can definitely appreciate some people wanting to try digital in-person. Games like Codenames take a few minutes to set up (plus shuffle time), and I’d rather spend time playing than doing mundane setup. Would love to see a product that can do it right…!
For me at least, part of the delight of a truly analogue tabletop game is experiencing all the little design tricks that are used to elegantly implement complex game mechanics (scoring, hidden info, turn taking, catch-up, etc) within the constraints imposed by bits of cardboard and plastic. Once a computer is part of the equation anyway, there's no point in any of that, and you might as well just be playing a game that is native to that platform.
For some people. Others (like myself!) actively dislike games where you have to read social cues, and prefer to be able to focus on the explicit (not implicit) game mechanics, keeping their socializing brain separate from (but still active during!) game-playing. Again - other people can enjoy things in other ways to you, and (so long as they're not hurting anyway) they are not wrong to do so.
I've found it nice for situations where everyone is in the same room and physical cards are possible, but one player may need to leave the room to monitor a dish that is slow-cooking or check on kids or work or whatever.
edit: the other time it came in really handy was in conditions adverse to cards (super windy, no table top, etc), but we all really wanted to get some hearts or euchre in :).
I'd still love to do it some day.
