A friend of mine introduced a card game to me she only knows by the name "Schweinemauzen" (we're in Germany, literally maybe "pig's meow"). Surprisingly, googling this word doesn't yield a single result. Maybe someone can help me in identifying the game if I give some basic rules:
- Deck: usually standard 52-card deck, but can be played with 36 cards.
- 2-5 or even more players. First with no cards left wins.
- Dealing cards:
- 3 rounds of 1 card, face down, per player; they are arranged side-by-side,
- 3 rounds of 1 card, face up, per player, each laid on top of one dealt before,
- finally, 3 rounds of 1 card, face down, per player, which the players pick up.
- The rest is kept as a stack.
- Gameplay:
- Some similarities to Durak.
- A player plays one or more cards of the same rank.
- The next player has to play one or more cards of the same or a higher rank.
- If someone cannot play, they have to pick up all cards which were played before.
- Ranks 2, 7, and 10 are special, they can be used to match an Ace and/or remove all cards on the "played" stack from the game, so that the next player who can't play doesn't have to pick those up.
- Each player immediately redraws from the stack after they played so that they have 3 cards.
- When the stack is empty, and no cards are left on the hand of a player, they use their face-up cards to play.
- When those are empty, the face-down cards are used to play, at which point the game becomes quite random.
Here you see the stack, the played cards stack next to it, and face-down/face-up cards for two players:
