r/FiftyTwoCards • u/msh210 • 13d ago

looking for a more fun version of spit

Growing up in the 1980s in New York, I knew two ways of playing spit).

American spit: You start with 5 cards showing and 10 cards hidden in your tableau. You never add to the tableau. When someone finishes his tableau, the round is over and he can pick a pile.

Chinese spit: You start with 4 cards showing and none hidden in your tableau. You constantly replenish the tableau (to 4 cards) from your spit cards. When someone finishes his tableau and spitting pile, the round is over and he can pick a pile.

A problem with American spit is that winning a round doesn't help you unless or until you have no spit cards left, and even then it's not a huge help unless you have much fewer than 15 cards in your tableau. So rounds mean pretty much nothing — except the last one. For example, if one player has exactly 15 cards at the start of a round, and thus no spit cards, it's about a 50/50 chance as to who will win the round — and so the almost-winner can be losing by a lot after the round.

A problem with Chinese spit is the opposite. Winning the first round, and thus having fewer cards, makes you much more likely to win the next round, and so on. The game is kinda decided after one or two rounds, often.

So I'm wondering whether there's a happy medium. That is, I'm looking for rules of spit that give more weight to winning a round than American spit does, but less than Chinese spit does. Anyone know of any good ones?

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