What makes a card game great?

It's time for some game theory

Note: I’m writing a book about Oh Hell. Some better version of this essay is going to go somewhere in the book. - Matt

I’m pretty confident that Oh Hell is the greatest card game ever invented. Possibly even by a significant margin.

It’s the greatest because it’s the answer to a simple question: what is the most fun and strategically interesting card game you will want to regularly play, will be able to regularly play, and will never grow tired of?

That’s not to say it’s the best card game—that honorific belongs to duplicate bridge. But duplicate bridge—while otherwise perfect—has two fatal flaws. First, bridge has too much start-up cost and too steep of a learning curve to be interesting to someone who as never played. Second, a duplicate bridge match is just an enormous pain to put together, and can basically never come together spontaneously. You will literally never be sitting around and hear someone say hey, you guys want to play some duplicate bridge?

And these two problems—startup cost and logistics—sink a lot of otherwise fun card games. A lot of games don't work for reason that have nothing to do with the gameplay itself. Many card games can’t be spontaneously played by novices when the moment strikes a group of people (like Bridge). Others force people to sit out if you don’t have the exact right number (again, Bridge). And a heck of lot of games—even games that are really interesting—just take too long or have too many moments of boredom.

So what are the ingredients of a great card game? I would venture that there are four. And they fall into three categories: gameplay, startup costs, and logistics.

You have to be able to outplay someone

The most important ingredient to any card game—or any game, period— is a meaningful strategy. Any decent card game has to provide positive feedback for skillful play; making better decisions than the other players should increase your probability of victory. So all else equal the more strategic decision points in a game, the better.

In any case, at a bare minimum, there has so be some strategic choice involved in the game. Otherwise, no matter how you dress it up, you're just playing War or Klondike solitaire. Good for passing the time, but not much else. Or maybe you're just playing Speed or Spit, which are fun but more physical races than strategic card games. Or maybe it’s jus a game with a dominant strategy, like Go Fish or Memory.

Closely related to strategy complexity is the idea of strategic instability. A game with a stable strategy is one in which you can devise your strategy either prior to the cards even being dealt, or right after they are initially dealt, without worrying too much about having to adjust them during the course of the game in response to your opponents actions.

This is partially the downfall of a game like full-books Go Fish or Palace: you get your hand, you watch what cards your opponents plays, but you really don't need to react dynamically to what they are doing. On the other end of the spectrum, games like Bridge and Whist require not only careful attention to what your opponent is doing, but a rethinking of your strategy based on what they are doing.

Now, while meaningful strategy and strategic instability are crucial, a great card game should also have the right amount of luck. Almost all card games have an element of luck; part of the beauty of the genre is the balance between luck and skill. That’s also why card games are great for gambling. The best games are ones in which the the time horizon for long-term skill to overtake short-term luck is enough to allow better players to usually win over the course of a full game/match, but not always. It’s no good if a game is 90% luck, but it’s also no good if it feels like chess.

You have to be able to actually play

Three are a ton of cards games that meet the above criteria. Literally hundreds of them. But they aren’t any good if you can’t actually get a game going, or if you can’t game has too big of a learning curve for people to enjoy it the first time they play.

This means you want your game to have rule simplicity. This is the death knell of so many card games, and particularly ones that satisfy the conditions of strategy complexity and instability. If a game can't be taught to new players in 10 minutes or less, you're not going to play it that often. This is the problem with Wisconsin Skat, which is an otherwise tremendous game. I'm pretty sure that would be one of the most popular three-person card games in the world, if it didn't take 45 minutes to teach it to someone.

Closely related to this is that the game needs to have a low-cost basic strategic startup. Even in games where the gameplay itself is trivially easy to explain, sometimes the strategy is such that you can’t really play it as a novice and get much out of it. You have to learn a least some level of minimum strategy before you can begin to see the interesting and beautiful things in the game.

This is, far and away, the downfall of Bridge. I have routinely spent the better part of two hours a few teaching smart and relatively card-savvy people how to play Bridge, just to never get around playing anything resembling a real game that first night. People walk away wondering what all the fuss is about. The learning curve isn’t high for the game mechanics, but it’s far too high on the strategy side. Just awful.

Finally, you have to actually be able to play the game. And this means you want a game where the number of participants is scalable. Nothing is worse than wanting to play one of the great partnership games (Bridge, Bid Whist, Partnership Spades, or even Gabes(!)) and having either just 3 people or, even worse, 5 people. The games that scale are much, much better. Mostly because you have a lot more opportunities to play them.

It can’t be boring. Ever.

Boring card games suck. Boring games in general suck. A lot of games—even games that are really fun most of the time—have elements of them that are terribly boring.

So a core element of a great game is little to no down time. Down time is the death of many otherwise great games. You can’t have people waiting around, either because someone else is taking forever with a decision, or because they have a hand that is hopeless and all they are doing for some period of time is mindlessly throwing in cards, with no strategic decisions to make.

This is the downfall of Pitch, which otherwise would be an amazing game. Way to often, you are barely participating, because you got dealt a junk hand, had no plausible chance of bidding, and during the play you're cards are so bad that you're nothing more than an automaton tossing junk into each trick. Do that for twenty minutes—not uncommon in many games—and you just want to stop playing.

In effect, all of the strategic complexity disappears, because your hand is so bad that it requires no strategy to play it. A surprising number of games are like this, and it's a major problem. Even Bridge suffers from a mild version of the same problem with the dummy; you can end up sitting out hand after hand if your partner keeps winning bids.

A related element of boredom is a game that goes on too long. Particularly if you are playing with children or people with differing tolerances for games, short games are better. But the best games are one with flexible lengths so the participants can choose ahead of time if they want to play for 30 minutes or 4 hours.

For example, Scrabble should be a great game, but it’s pure garbage because it fails on both of the boredom dimensions. You spend most of the game staring into space waiting for someone to take their damn turn. And a game of Scrabble is a fixed length, and that length is too long.

There are two ways to fix Scrabble. The ok way is to play with chess clocks on a very short timer (about 6 minutes per player). That reduces the down time and solves the length problem. But the real way to fix Scrabble is to throw it in the garbage can and play Bananagrams, which uses Scrabble tiles, but everyone plays simultaneously and an individual game takes 5-7 minutes.

Oh Hell to the Rescue

So there you have it: a great card game needs (1) meaningful strategy; (2) strategic instability; (3) rule simplicity; (4) low cost basic strategy startup; (5) a scalable number of participants; (6) little to no downtime; and (7) a flexible overall length.

Enter Oh Hell.

If you know how to play any game that uses tricks and trump, I can teach you how to play in less than two minutes.¹ And you can play with any number of players as long as you have at least 3.

But the real beauty is that there's zero down-time. Since each person's objective is to correctly evaluate the exact number of tricks they can take and then execute that evaluation, the absolute strength/weakness of your hand is of utterly no consequence to the playing of the hand. But every card you play is incredibly meaningful.

It is pure genius, because it completely wipes out the boredom of getting bad hands over and over again, as well as the complaints that people are getting "dealt bad cards." Bad situations can still arise strategically, but there's no such thing as a bad hand out of the gate. And you will be fully engaged in every hand, from the first card you play till the last.

And, of course, the strategy. Good lord. My grandparents Hoyle from the 1940s describes Oh Hell as having “the rare merit of being extremely simple to learn and play, while affording extraordinary opportunity for skill in bidding and play.”

I've never met another game that plays and feels like a cross between bride and poker, but this one does. In one sense, you have to plan your tricks out, like Bridge, before the hand starts playing out. But inevitably, the actions of the other players will affect which cards in your hand are the winners and losers, and thus which cards you need to win with and which cards you need to dump. And thus it is often the case that you end up pitching an Ace away on other-led suits, only to later win tricks with trash cards.

Like Bridge, you often spend a lot of time pondering how you are going to lose control and then gain it back. But like poker, there a lot of room for bluff-like moves, especially ducking tricks. It's the most strategically-dynamic card game I've ever played. Even the bidding requires some interesting thinking and tactics, especially in the early/late rounds, when you hold very few cards in your hand.

Oh Hell also has more "eureka" moments than any other card game. It's the kind of game that makes you feel brilliant, and makes you marvel at other people's brilliance. But not so much that better players dominate; Oh Hell has an excellent mix of skill and luck.

In the end, it's one of the few games that leaves everyone at the table smiling.

By the way, Poker isn’t a card game

My dad—who loved card games maybe more than I do—was very fond of saying there are only three real card games: poker, gin, and bridge. Everything else is just a variation of one of those games. But poker’s not a card game; it’s a gambling game played with cards. And gin is tedious except as a hustle. So if you want to play cards—real cards—start with bridge.²

I think this is right. The games that make people fall in love with playing cards are the tricks and trumps derivatives of whist/bridge: pitch, euchre, catch the ten, hearts, spades, and of course Oh Hell. Those are card games, where the play of the cards is the key to the game, and the beauty often lies in seeing unbelievably gorgeous orders in which to play them. This is why I always recommend people start kids on the Whist derivatives, rather than on poker.³

Poker is a gambling game played with cards. And it’s a heck of an interesting one; I certainly love it. But it’s not a great card game at it’s core. There’s a ton of downtime. The winning strategy is pretty darn boring, and certainly less fun than a lot of losing strategies.⁴

And everyone knows that if you don’t play for money, the game is stupid.⁵ You can somewhat solve this by playing tournaments, which work more or less fine for no money, but a lot of people still find that dumb.

1. X rounds, in the first round each player gets 3 cards, second 4, and so forth, up to the maximum the number of players can accommodate, an then back down. In each round, after the deal, a card from the deck is flipped for trump. After that, starting left of the dealer, players make a single bid on exactly how many tricks they will win. The dealer cannot bid a number of tricks such that total bids equal total tricks. After the bids, left of the dealer leads and players must follow suit if they can. Trick winner leads next trick. After all tricks played, players who made exactly their bid score (10+bid) or (5 + round #) if they bid zero tricks, everyone else scores zero. Most points at the end of all rounds win.

2. Now, Dad’s right and he’s wrong. It’s pretty obvious Authors (the quite-fun adult version of Go Fish) is the fourth card game.

3. The killer kids commercial card game that has all the attributes of a great game is Sushi-Go. Quite possibly the best family card game of all-time; concurrent play for everyone, a 4-year old can play without ruining it for adults, and a ton of strategic depth. A masterpiece.

4. This is the main reason playing low-stakes poker a the kitchen table can be a bad idea if you are actually trying to get better. All the boredom incentives tend to encourage you to play suboptimal strategies. Heck, plenty of people play suboptimal strategies out of boredom fore high stakes at public card rooms.

5. Conversely, the actual great card games—like Oh Hell—are incredibly fun to gamble on.