From: tao@tomato.princeton.edu (Terry Tao)
Subject: Re: Cripple Mr Onion                        
Originator: news@nimaster
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 16:54:34 GMT

It's too complicated to write out the full details here, but here is a sketch of
the order of play so far.

Each person places 1 penny (or stone, etc) in the pot as an ante.

Each person gets dealt 5 cards. Starting from the dealer's right, they have the option of exchanging up to four cards from the deck.

The first round of betting ensues.

Starting from the dealer, everyone is dealt a further 5 cards.  The dealer's are
face down; the players are face up.  However, each player can pay a penny to have
one card face down, hence a player putting 5 pennies in the pot will have all his
cards face down.

The second round of betting ensues.

Now starting from the dealer's right, each player must reveal his entire hand and
sort it into winning combinations.  Usually some cards will not be part of any combination and they are of no value.


The winner is the person with the highest ranking combination.  If two or more people have the same combination, then the player's second-highest-ranking combinations are compared.  If there is a tie all the way down the line, the dealer wins.  (The way the game is organized, the dealer is always playing, for if the dealer folds the dealership is up for auction.)

e.g. if a person has

2234467KKA

the best way to sort this hand would be to have a six-card onion first (2234467)
then a two card onion (KA), with the second king being worthless.

The game is fairly playable: I've already been suckered out of 60c so far.  A few
problems: it seems to depend too much on the number of aces one gets.  10s and 9s
are almost worthless.  To combat this, we have playtested a few modifiers to bring
down the power of the Aces and to bring up the worth of the 10s and 9s, but we're still testing.

Our first modifier is the use of 8s.  The 8s represent magic.  eight 8s are the Octavo and we are ranking them at about the level of a Lesser Onion.  The 8s can be used as 8s or 0s: the idea of using them as 0s is to "trump up" a small onion into a slightly larger onion: hence,
while 3567 is a four card onion, 35678 is a five card onion. three 8s are a wild
royal.  After an 8 has been used as a 0, for the next round they are wild (can act as any card from A to K, excepting special god cards).  However, the use of
too many 8's will attract the attention of Bel Shamharoth, among others.

The Aces represent heroes of the Disc:normally they make an integral part of the
winning hands (we seem to find that Double Onion is the most common winning hand,
btw), but with a few modifiers we intend to make heroes subject to blind luck and cruel fate.  Our rules are a bit complicated here.

Suggestions welcome for any modifiers, or special hands.

Btw: about my remark about "non-identical decks".  While it is a minor point that decks of different color will convey a little bit of knowledge about ones hand, I suppose it is best to have two identical decks.  However, for special cards (if there are going to be any) there should only be one of each.  For the purposes
of flushes, and 9-card straight flushes, it seems reasonable to have only four 
suits, otherwise flushes would be extremely difficult.

Terry
Newsgroups: alt.fan.pratchett