Reverse Shithead
Contributed by Andrew Duthie from Ottawa Canada
(duth0001@algonquinc.on.ca).
He writes as follows:
I was first showed the game [Shithead]
a few years ago by a friend of mine in England and we played for
a while but found it kind of boring so we actually added a large
twist to the game. Here is how it works - I call it reverse fucked-up
shithead, but if that is too profanic you could just call it reverse
shithead.
The game is really two parts. The first part is
regular shithead, 2's beat everything, 10's beat everything, aces
are high. As you are first dealt your cards, you can pile same
numbers on one another on the face down cards (doubling or tripling
up etc..). Any threes you get are thrown into the central discard
pile. The first person to play is the one after the person who
threw down the last three. If no-one has a three than you do the
same with 4's, etc...until you have a start to the game.
During the play you are forced to play a card rather
than pick up if you can. Jacks are miss a turn for the next player
(two turns in the clockwise direction if two jacks are played
etc..). If playing with jokers, they skip the next persons turn
and they take the value of the card underneath (example.- a joker
played on a jack causes a double turn skip).
Those are the shithead rules, now is the fun part.
The next part is reverse shithead. Every rule of shithead and
the ones mentioned above are the same except aces are now worth
1 (lowest value card of the deck). Kings are therefore highest,
followed by queens, etc. Twos still beat everything and are beaten
by everything except aces. When you first receive your cards,
kings are thrown in the middle instead of 3's. The first person
to go is the one after the person who threw in the last king.
When it is your turn to play, you are still forced to play a card
whenever you can. If you cannot play on the previous player's
card, instead of you picking up the pile, the person before you
picks it up (the placer of the card picks up the pile). So you
do not want the beat the other persons card, although you are
forced to - kind of the opposite of regular shithead. In the reversed
game you do not want 2's, 10's or high cards. You do not want
to be able to beat the previous person's card.
At the start of a reversed game it is a race to
get your kings on the table, not by rule but because you may get
screwed if you don't. Let's say you played the last king, the
next person sees that you played a king, and will make sure he/she
doesnt have anything that can beat it in his hand during arrangement
of his cards. So the person that threw it in the middle now picks
it up because the person next couldnt beat it, and the person
before knows he/she can play whatever they want because the next
person is holding a king, and a king beats everything. A king
is terrible to have, since only a 2,10,king or joker(if using
jokers) beats it, you may be stuck with a king for a while.
Now is the last step. you combine both games. Dealer
calls how the game is going to start, either reversed or normal,
people set up their cards as they want (it is hard to tell which
cards to leave because you do not know which game the game will
be in when you get down to those cards.) The game starts, (it
always starts clockwise) . All regular rules apply except that
when someone plays a 7, the game switches to the opposite of what
it currently is, reversed to normal or normal to reversed. It
also changes direction - either clockwise to counter clockwise
or vise-versa.
And that is it. Very tricky but alot of fun. Remember
to watch jokers. When a joker is placed on a seven it takes the
value of the seven which switches the game, switches the direction
of play, and then skips a turn in that direction.
One last thing, if four jacks are played, four
turns are skipped (including the person that placed the jokers),
the pile is cleared and whoever's turn it happens to land on,
it is their turn, not the placers.
Stolen for my own evil purposes on March 7th, 2000 from http://www.pagat.com/invented/reverse_shithead.html.
