(Redirected from Nertz)
Nerts Card Game Set
Nertz is a fast paced multi-player solitaire card game for 2-4 players, each playing with their own deck of cards. The objective of Nertz is to score more points than your opponents by playing cards in sequence from ace to king onto shared foundation piles.
- 4 Player Solitaire! Nertz is a crazy ninja fast, real-time, multiplayer card game like Solitaire. Nertz (Pounce) is a combination of the card games Speed and Solitaire. The goal of the game is to play all of your Nertz cards before the other player do. Game play is similar to Solitaire but all pl.
- Nertz, also known widely as Pounce, is a fast paced card game where every player has their own standard deck of cards and engage in a form of multi-player solitaire. Decks with different backs are a must. Players all deal 13 cards into a draw pile and four cards out in front of themselves.
- Nerts is a multi-player card game similar to Spit/Speed & Klondike Solitaire. Play against two challenging AI opponents. Gameplay is turn-based giving you a chance to find the best move, and your.
Alternative name | Pounce, Racing Demon |
---|---|
Players | Ideally 2–8 |
Skills required | Quick reaction, awareness of cards being played simultaneously, counting. |
Age range | 8+ |
Cards | 52 per deck, each player or team uses a standard playing card deck. Each team's deck must be a different design or color from the rest of the decks being used, to identify cards after the round ends. |
Related games | |
Demon, Spit, Dutch Blitz |
Nerts (US),[1]Pounce (US)[1] or Racing Demon (UK)[1] Best online casinos in indiana. is a fast-paced, multiplayer card game involving multiple decks of playing cards. It is often described as a combination of the card games Speed and Solitaire.
Names[edit]
The game is of English origin and is recorded as Racing Demon as early as 1933 in the magazine Punch[2] with accounts soon following in American publications from 1934 onwards under the name Pounce.[3] Today proprietary Racing Demon cards are produced for it, consisting of ordinary 52-card Anglo-American pattern packs with different coloured backs. It had reached America by the 1960s, where it was also initially known as Racing Demon,[4] but later became known as Nerts. The game also goes under many other names including: Peanuts[5]Pounce,[1]Racing Canfield,[1]Scramble,[1]Squeal[5] and Scrooge.[5] The game's name can also be spelt Nertz.
History[edit]
Card game expert David Parlett says the game, originally called Racing Demon,[1] was created in the 1890s, but is now known as Pounce internationally and Nerts in the US.[1] The National Nertz Association (U.S.) blog says it is unaware of any known inventor or specific date of creation for the game, but that it has been around since the 1940s.[6]
If one were to attempt to play Nerts alone, one would essentially be playing Canfield, a variant of the classic Klondike Solitaire (also called Patience). For this reason Hoyle's Rules of Games describes Pounce as 'Canfield played by two or more players'.[7]
Description[edit]
Nerts is a competitive form of Patience or Solitaire in which players or teams race to get rid of the cards in their 'Nerts pile' by playing them in sequences from aces upwards, either into their personal area or in a communal central area. Each player or team uses their own deck of playing cards throughout the game.
The number of players or teams that can play in a game is limited only by the number of decks and the amount of space available.
Pounce (1934)[edit]
The rules described by Breen for Pounce in 1934 may be summarised as follows:[3]
Each player has a shuffled pack of cards. The top thirteen are placed face up in front of the player as the 'pounce pile'. Then four cards are placed in a row face up beside it. Cards are taken, three at a time, from the remaining stock and used to build on any Aces in the middle or on the four cards in the row. Cards must be built in alternating colour and descending order. The first player to shed all his pounce pile wins by shouting 'Pounce!' The winner scores 1 for every card in the middle of the table and 10 for pounce. The others score 1 for every card in the centre, but lose 2 for each card remaining in the pounce pile.
Mechanics[edit]
A game of Nerts is typically played as a series of hands. Between hands, scores are tallied and the cards are sorted and given back to the players or teams that played them. After the cards are returned, the decks are shuffled and set up for the next hand and the process is repeated until a player wins.
During a hand, players do not take turns: instead, they play simultaneously, and may play cards onto one another's Lake cards. There are four areas that a player or team uses: the Lake, the River, the Stream, and the Nerts pile.[8] The Lake is the central area, used to score points, which any player or team may use by building suited piles in ascending order without doubles. The River is a 4-columned personal area that a player or team uses by cascading and/or playing cards from columns of alternating color and descending order (like the tableau piles in Solitaire). The Stream is a pile that is continually flipped (usually in groups of three cards at a time) in search of cards to play into the Lake or River. The Nerts pile is a 13-card pile that players try to get rid of cards from one at a time, from the top of the pile, into available Lake or River destinations. The first player or team to successfully get rid of their Nerts pile calls or shouts 'Nerts'. Once 'Nerts' is called all play for that hand stops.
In a hand, players or teams earn points determined by a formula using the number of cards played into the Lake subtracted by twice the number of cards remaining in the Nerts pile. Awarding 10-point bonuses to players or teams that call Nerts is a fairly common practice. Generally a game is played to a set score like 100 points, in which case players will play as many hands as needed until a winner emerges. Sometimes the endgame condition is when the difference between the highest score and the lowest score exceeds some value, such as 100. On occasion, players keep tallies of games won instead of adding hand scores and then use the tallies to determine a winner. It is also common for players or teams to receive negative hand and game scores.
Organization[edit]
United States[edit]
In the USA the National Nertz Association website has published an 'Official Nertz Rulebook'.[6]Pagat, the leading card game website, has also posted rules for the game of Nerts. Not every Nerts player plays by exactly the same rules, so when playing with others, one may notice some elements of this game such as the terms, game-play, scoring, set-up, shuffling and dealing procedure, and penalty procedure may be different.
Commercial versions[edit]
Nerts-inspired retail game sets include Ligretto, Dutch Blitz, Solitaire Frenzy, Wackee Six, Nay Jay! and Perpetual Commotion, sharing the same basic elements with some differences.[6] All games have piles that players race to get rid of as the hand objective, and use more than 54 cards. They all have both communal and personal areas, all use the same-suit (or color), ascending builds for Lake piles and the alternating-suit (or color) builds for River Piles. They are all also played in real-time.
Electronic Nerts[edit]
The first known electronic Nerts game was Nertz! The Card Game by John Ronnander and Majicsoft for the Atari ST system and was released for purchase in 1995.[9] It was capable linking nine Atari systems for a large human multiplayer experience and also had an option in which two players could play on a single system. Since then many others have produced electronic Nerts-style games in an attempt to bring the Nerts experience to consoles, PCs, and mobile apps. The first Nerts game offered to PC's was eNerts released in 2000 by John Drake. One could purchase and download this game for the Windows OS from the eNerts website. eNerts offered users matches against AI opponents with adjustable difficulty settings. In 2007 Solitaire Showdown was added to the list of free games available to play on Windows Live Messenger (then MSN Messenger). To play this game one would challenge a friend from their messenger friend list to a heads-up match.
In 2008, Games.com (or AOL Games) added a free online Nerts game called Solitaire Race to their list of games. In this game one could play up to four human or computer opponents. In the same year, two other Nerts PC games, available as software, were released which were Nertz Solitaire and Nerts High Speed Card Game. Nertz Solitaire was a game based on the NERTZ LLC decks using squirrel characters as opponents. This PC game only offered AI opponents and was available for download and purchase online only. Nerts High Speed Card Game was also available for download and purchase online only but this game offered both human and AI opponent capabilities.[5] This game was developed by John Ronnander, the same person who released the first electronic Nerts game in 1995.
Nerts apps for mobile devices also exist.
See also[edit]
- Canfield (solitaire) also known as Demon
- Dutch Blitz, a similar game produced by the Pennsylvania Dutch
- Ligretto, a similar game produced in Germany
- Solitaire Showdown, a similar game played online in Windows Live Messenger
- Solitaire terminology, which shares many terms with Nerts.
Nertz Card Game Online
References[edit]
- ^ abcdefghParlett 2008, p. 544. sfn error: no target: CITEREFParlett2008 (help)
- ^Punch 1933, p. 20. sfn error: no target: CITEREFPunch1933 (help)
- ^ abBreen 1934, p. 71. sfn error: no target: CITEREFBreen1934 (help)
- ^The Atlantic Monthly 1963, p. 72. sfn error: no target: CITEREFThe_Atlantic_Monthly1963 (help)
- ^ abcdNerts / Pounce / Racing Demon at www.pagat.com. Retrieve 27 Dec 2019.
- ^ abcNNA: Nertz History. Blogspot. 2010.
- ^'Canfield' (p.198) in Hoyle's Rules of Games (3rd edition) by Philip D. Morehead (ed.), 2001. ISBN0-451-20484-0
- ^Heart of the Matter Online NERTZ! A Fun Family Game, 2010.
- ^NNA: Nertz Products of the Past. Blogspot. 2010.
Literature[edit]
- Breen, Mary J. (1934). Partners in Play: Recreation for Young Men and Young Women Together. National Recreation Association, A.S. Barnes.
- Parlett, David (2008). The Penguin Book of Card Games, Penguin, London. ISBN978-0-141-03787-5
External links[edit]
Nerts Card Game Online
The Wikibook Card Games has a page on the topic of: Nertz |
- The National Nertz Association – An organization devoted to Nerts players.
- Pagat's Rules for Nerts – Contains detailed rules for hundreds of card games.
- Variations for Nertz at Free Forums – Lists many Nerts variations.
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nerts&oldid=1001962868'
We're no strangers to video games as escapism during the pandemic, especially the games that bring friends together online with simple-yet-deep gameplay. That very premise catapulted Among Us, a quietly launched indie game from 2018, to the top of 2020's charts and headlines.
After only one week, 2021 has already started as a.. rollicking year, which has led me to the unusual step of highlighting a new, free multiplayer card game on Windows, Mac, and Linux that we might not otherwise cover at Ars Technica: Nerts! One reason is that it's currently the 'best new game' of 2021—admittedly a silly designation only seven days into the year, but I'm counting it.
You may have already stumbled upon Nerts! as a child, perhaps calling it Pounce or Racing Demon, as it's a modified version of solitaire for larger groups of players—a fact that the game's developers at Zachtronics freely admit (and perhaps plays into the game's free-as-in-beer price). The below video tells the story, though you'll want to read my context to better parse it.
Play ring of fire. Up to six players can compete in Nerts!, and everyone gets their own deck of 52 cards. The cards are arranged in a solitaire-like fashion, with four placed as opening 'stacks,' 13 in a special 'Nerts pile,' and the rest as a draw deck. Like in solitaire, your stacks can be built as descending numerical counts (K-Q-J-10-9 and so on) with alternating red-black colors, and ace cards go into their own dumping ground, for the sake of extracting cards from your stacks (in ascending numerical order with a matching suit).
Advertisement The first catch: this is multiplayer, so the middle of the screen is a shared pool of aces. As soon as someone drops, say, an ace of spades, anyone with a two of spades can toss theirs into the center to reduce their deck.
Additionally, since each player only gets four stacks to work with, instead of solitaire's standard seven-stack count, you can put any card into an empty spot, not just a king.
Most importantly, you score more points by getting rid of every single card from your Nerts pile: two points per removal, as opposed to one point per card moved to the aces pool. (If you don't win a round, you lose points for every card left in your Nerts pile.) First to 100 points wins. All this means your path to victory is about managing that weird pile of 13 cards within both your limited series of stacks and a crazy-busy fray of shared aces.
![Nerts Nerts](/uploads/1/3/7/1/137124069/679811654.jpg)
High tick rate for solitaire shenanigans
This game landed on our radar because of its pedigree. Zachtronics, a game studio from the Seattle area, is better known for deliriously complicated games like SpaceChem, Infinifactory, and Exapunks. Turns out, those developers sometimes play simpler games to cleanse their design palates while developing games, usually in a shared office with physical cards. The 2020 pandemic changed that, so the studio decided to code its own virtual version to keep the office tradition alive—then cleaned the app up for public consumption and surprise-launched it on Steam on Tuesday of this week.
The result is a few levels above 'barebones,' which means the free game lacks a clear tutorial and a built-in matchmaking menu, but this is still pretty robust. For starters, a hotfix landed one day after the game's launch to add an 'invite to lobby' shortcut URL for Steam that works even if someone isn't on your friends list, which you can easily drop in a Discord or Slack channel to bring new players into your sessions. Additionally, Zachtronics' netcode is quite good here, since it tracks every player's mouse cursor at an apparent 30Hz tick rate—which means you can playfully put your mouse cursor into your foes' card fields as a form of communication or taunting (or, if you're nicer, use your mouse cursor to help struggling friends by pointing at ideal moves).
Advertisement This package feels like 'get what you pay for' in certain obvious ways, like a 15-second theme song that plays at the beginning of every session with no option to disable as of press time. At first, I was annoyed by this forced pause, but I've grown to appreciate the cheesy, overlong jingle as part of the Nerts! ritual. The rougher stuff comes from sessions with fewer than four players, where players can more easily draw themselves into a 'no moves left' solitaire corner. Nerts! tries to help with this by automatically shuffling each player's 'draw-three' deck after a certain interval of time, which can get useful cards into your arsenal when you're stuck, but the developers have already hinted at rules changes in an upcoming patch for lower player counts.
Ultimately, Zachtronics' free version of the battle-solitaire classic is already better than what you'll find in free Web browser game portals (and we feel strongly about day-one Linux and Mac support around these parts). Nerts! offers a lovely mix of card-shuffling activity for heightened focus and pause-to-reflect downtime for voice-chat silliness—the exact kind of social gaming brain activation I've been hungry for in a world with fewer board game nights with friends. It's a wonderful gift of accessible card-battling gaming, and you shouldn't hesitate to download and try it even in its launch state, even before more potential patches come to this free game—but definitely try to play with a sweet-spot fray of four players total (even though it's fun in the wild five- to six-player version and totally fine with two or three). Listing image by Zachtronics