Cucumber (card game)
History and distribution. According to John McLeod, the game may have originated in the 1940s as a way of playing Krypkille with a standard 52-card pack as opposed to the traditional Swedish Kille cards. Today the game is played in different national variants under different names: as Agurk in Denmark, Gurka in Norway and Sweden, Ogórek in Poland, Kurkku and Mätäpesä in Finland, and Gúrka in Iceland. Cards. Cucumber is played with a regular pack of French-suited playing cards without the Jokers. The Ace is the highest, the Deuce, the lowest card. Suits are irrelevant . Rules. The basic Danish rules are as follows: Deal and play are clockwise. Each player receives seven cards and any remaining cards are set aside. Forehand leads to the first trick and everyone has to head the trick, which they can do in the first six tricks by playing a card of a higher or equal rank. In the last trick, two or more players with the highest card win and all score the penalty points due. If a player cannot head the trick, he plays his lowest card. The winner of the trick leads to the next. The  player who makes the last trick loses. Aces have a special role. If an Ace is led, the lowest card must be played, even if by players who hold an Aces themselves. If several deals are played in succession, the loser scores penalty points based on how the value of the trick, with numerals scoring their face value, and the courts scoring as follows: Jack 11, Queen 12, King, 13 and Ace 14. A player scoring over 30 points, drops out. The winner is the last player left in. A cucumber may be drawn to indicate that a player has  dropped out. Hard score. According to Parlett, if the game is played for hard score, each player antes a stake to the pot. A player who is 'cucumbered' (i.e. reaches, not exceeds, 30 and drops out), may buy himself back in by paying a stake, but starts with a score equal to that of the player with the highest number of penalty points. A player can only do this once and may only do so if there are at least 3 other players still in. The last player in sweeps the pot. Variations. The following variations may be played: Five  Cucumbers. In 2013, Friedemann Friese released a derivative game, Five Cucumbers ("Fünf Gurken"), where there are 60 cards in the game, and where the loser of each deal gets one or more cucumber pieces, and you lose the game, if you get more than five.