Top Traditional Card Games For Just Two Players

I love modern games, and own a large collection of them. But I also love traditional games played with a standard deck of playing cards. The excitement of card games explains why playing cards spread rapidly throughout Europe after they first arrived there in the late 14th century.

And across the centuries, card games with a standard deck are still as popular as ever. Casual poker tournaments are found around the world, and the game is even played professionally and gets TV coverage. While classic card games like Bridge may be waning in popularity, many wonderful new card games have emerged over the last century, and added to the diverse options for great games that can be played with a traditional deck. The choices are many: classic trick-taking games like Pinochle or Whist, modern trick-taking games like Hearts or Spades, partnership games like Canasta or 500, social games like President or Palace, and children's games like Slap Jack or Go Fish.

But what if you only have two players? Suddenly the options become more limited. A lot of card games can be played with two players, like Canasta. But in many instances the game experience is inferior to the same game played with more people at the table. Fortunately there are a lot of fantastic card games that are terrific with exactly two players.

Here is a carefully curated list of popular two-player games played with standard playing cards. I have focused especially on traditional games that have proven themselves, and are most loved and well-known. There are some contemporary two-player card games that are very good, but these still need to stand the test of time. I've consulted a lot of sources in making this list, and have also drawn on my own extensive experience in playing card games. But it is a subjective choice, so I've included a longer list of "Honorable Mentions" at the end, as well as a "What next" section following each game, to point to other strong contenders that are worth looking at. To keep things simple, games are listed in alphabetical order. So find yourself a friend or companion, grab a deck of cards, and see what fun can be had playing these fantastic two-player card games!

Cribbage

Cribbage is instantly recognizable due to the iconic board used for scoring. It's a classic card game that goes back to the 1600s, and despite some quirky rules,

Merry Bloomin' Christmas: God rest ye merry gentlemen? Not on Clarkson's Farm when there are cows to catch and candles to flog. Jeremy, his girlfriend Lisa and farm hands Kaleb and Gerald explain why there will be no festive respite down on Diddly Squat.

By Jeremy Clarkson (Sunday Times, Dec. 19)

Christmas on the farm. You can picture it, can't you? A steaming home-grown goose, glistening in the candlelight. Piles of spuds from the garden and buttered vegetables from the fields. Rosy-faced children playing happily with the wooden toys you whittled from trees in the forest and, after a sticky toffee pudding, some hearty toboggan rides in the snow until the watery sun's chilly demise sends everyone running inside for some fireside sherry and the shoulderpunching, yuletide jumper fun of having to mime The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B in a game of charades. Idyllic. Nearly as idyllic in fact as having to act out the trickiest charade of all time, Versailles: The View from Sweden.

Sadly Christmas on my farm won't be like that. It will be like every other day, only with added mud. When I first became a horny-handed son of the soil two years ago, I figured that winter would be an easy season. The sheeps would be pregnant, the cows would be in their house, the crops would be growing on their own, the hens would be standing around waiting to be eaten by a fox, the badgers would be spraying TB around the fields and I'd be in Val d'Isere, living it large on the fat subsidy cheque.

That's not how it turned out, though, partly because the subsidy cheque is now smaller than a prewar postal order and soon it'll be even smaller than that. And also because winter is actually the season when you go out into the cold and the rain and the mud and do all the unpleasant jobs you should have done in August while you were waiting for the crops to dry.

Mostly this involves looking at broken fences and gates, hoping that somehow they will mend themselves. They can't, so I have to do it and, amazingly, this is a skill I don't have. While I've always said that hammers can be used to fix everything up to but not including a child's poorly eye, I've never really understood how they may be used to drive a nail into a piece of wood.

On the first blow I always catch the side of the nailhead, causing the nail itself to bend. And then I imagine that if I strike the opposite side of the head with the same level of ferocity, the kink will straighten out. It never does

In this month’s epic semifinal showdown, the wiley super-wino Charles “The Battlin’ Barfly” Bukowski challenges the cast-iron liver of refined rummy William “The Souse From the South” Faulkner.

Table Side Announcers: Howard Cosell and Sir Laurence Olivier
Ref: Bill “The Fox” Foster

Tale of the Tab:

Bukowski
His is a Cinderella story — late in life he fought his way up from the the tough skid row bars of L.A. to seize international recognition as one of the finest hoochhounds of his generation. He couldn’t afford the best drinks to train with, but he did well with what he could beg, borrow and steal. There isn’t a thirstier fighter in the tournament. His only weakness is his glass stomach: while he can hold his own with the best, he has the proclivity to vomit at any particular moment.

Faulkner vs. Bukowski, as FBC audience members look on

Faulkner
Though slight in build, the southern scribe’s capacity for hooch is the stuff of legend. An accomplished master of the month-long bender, his genteel appearance belies his taste for corn liquor and high proof rotgut. The descendent of a very long and illustrious line of drunkards, he is born and bred to the art like a bird dog.

The Build Up

Howard Cosell: What a contrast: the Southern Dandy Vs. the Southern California Wino.
Laurence Olivier: If he sticks to form, we can expect Faulkner to try to rattle Bukowski early with a moonshine flurry.
HC: And Bukowski will undoubtedly counter-punch with a selection of fortified wines, in hopes of offending Faulkner’s palate.

(Faulkner wins the coin toss.)

Round One

Faulkner orders fruit jars of moonshine.
HC: True to form.
LO: Which makes him predictable. I wonder if Bukowski has worked up a strategy to take advantage of Faulkner’s patterns.
HC: They both have a civilized sip from their jars. I was watching Buk’s face for effect, but if the high-octane corn liquor fazed him, he hides it well.
LO: Just look at the two of them. If they were just two chaps sitting in a bar, you’d bet your last penny on Bukowski.
HC: Faulkner certainly doesn’t look the part of a hard pounder. And he has used that deceptive appearance to great advantage in his previous bouts.. When it comes to drinking contests, not taking your opp

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

Do your worst!

They were cooked in Greece.

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

First|Read more Skyrates?! on Royal Road - there are 70 chapters available!

On the other side of the bar, Sir Broderick was stewing in his seat, boozy hiccups coloring his breath crimson. He stared out the window, looking with scornful eyes upon the oppressive film of condensation doubtlessly imparted by Wayword Woods.

Oh, how he detested the Wayword Woods, and with hood reason. The Wayword Woods were indeed so humid that what was oft remarked upon as ‘morning’ dew covered the Wayword Woods’ every fern and tree and bush and decaying animal corpse at all times of the day.

Yes, surely even at that very moment the Wayword Woods were coated in dew, even though it was well into the evening. About half passed-gas, as they said in Caldonia.

Yes, Sir Broderick considered, it was half passed-gas and there the Wayword Woods sat, right outside the foggy window of the Belligerent Bar-D, and misty morning dew had been calmly copulating with everything containing chlorophyll, and also anything decomposing, since it cut the cheese.

‘It cut the cheese,’ of course, referred to when the sun rose every morning. It used to be called ‘the cutting of the cheese’ until all the hip kids replaced their parents at the CCC (caucus on common colloquialisms) and decided that ‘the cutting of the cheese’ was just a little too formal for something that sounded so stupid, and therefore not as enjoyable to say.

Their parents and grandparents, in a state of what was known in Caldonia as disgrosst, argued instead that it sounded far stupider to formalize ‘the cutting of the cheese’ and that said added stupidity equaled added enjoyment to saying the saying.

There were a silent few that argued in the dark that this was all bread and circuses to distract from the fact that ‘sunrise’ had far fewer syllables than ‘it cut the cheese,’ which itself had even less syllables than ‘the cutting of the cheese,’ but good, honest people didn’t talk about those folks.

“Shitface! Stop staring at nothing and get over here you blathering baboon!”

Sir Broderick’s eyes flitted to a focus as he cringed inwardly as a man best described as tall and dense stormed up to him, pulled him from his comfortable, sullen table and embraced him in a beer-tinged embrace.

“Oi there Thurmy. Chips and fish and—” Sir Broderick let forth a bile-fil

Don't you know a good pun is its own reword?

Two muffins are in an oven, one muffin looks at the other and says "is it just me, or is it hot in here?"

Then the other muffin says "AHH, TALKING MUFFIN!!!"

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

It really does, I swear!

Because she wanted to see the task manager.

But that’s comparing apples to oranges

Heard they've been doing some shady business.

but then I remembered it was ground this morning.

Edit: Thank you guys for the awards, they're much nicer than the cardboard sleeve I've been using and reassures me that my jokes aren't stale

Edit 2: I have already been made aware that Men In Black 3 has told a version of this joke before. If the joke is not new to you, please enjoy any of the single origin puns in the comments

>Prognosis Death is a set collection card game where each player is a doctor who is trying to take the credit for curing a patient. You’ll collect symptoms and use them to construct a diagnosis. You’ll challenge and outwit your rivals, and you’ll get the recognition you deserve – at any cost!
>
>To see the final version of Prognosis Death, head over to our Kickstarter HERE

I made a post last week (LINK) about the graphical design process for our cards, which was well received. I decided to have a go at explaining our Design and Development process. This post contains details of the various iterations of Prognosis Death before we settled on the core design and started refining it.

https://preview.redd.it/3ksmqfwjts881.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=ffdcf76b73b00583655d3377f940dbb8a054367c

Design

It starts with Gin Rummy.

I’d been playing a reasonable amount of Rummy and while I found the flow of the game interesting, I often found myself wishing there was more depth to the decisions.

The aspects of Gin Rummy that I liked and wanted to try to keep were:

• Set collection
• Flexibility in deciding when to end the game (‘Knocking’)
• The basic turn structure. (get a card from deck or discard area, make sets, discard a card)
• Allowing players to make sets after an opponent has decided to Knock.

There are a huge number of different games in the Rummy family, ultimately I took inspiration from a few different ones, but Prognosis Death has most in common with Gin Rummy

Iteration 1

Initially I wanted to keep gameplay reasonably faithful to Gin Rummy, but I wanted to enhance it by increasing the decision space. The first things I implemented were:

• More suits (6 suits of 10 cards, instead of 4 suits 13). My only real reason for this was I wanted to see how it played with different types of set collection.
• Different set collection. Gin Rummy has players make sets of the same value cards, or runs of cards in the same suit. With additional suits, it becomes too hard to make runs in the same suit, and too easy to make them across multiple suits, so sets would now be based on card value, or suit.
• Card abilities that interact with the basic Gin Rummy turn structure (draw from deck or discard area, make sets, discard).

Decision paralysis has been

BamBOO!

They’re on standbi

A play on words.

My daughter, Chewbecca, not so much.

Pilot on me!!

Christopher Walken

Nothing, he was gladiator.

CW: blood, homicide, physical abuse

Hello everyone,

This is the first time I’m writing here. I don’t even know how to start. I have been diagnosed with CPTSD and recently had my 41st birthday, but all I could think about is how I outlived my mom. I had memories about her murder come back to me that I thought were blocked away, including some other memories that I shared with her she told me to forget. She was the best to me, I felt loved, always cooked together, played cards, danced, she was super strict, but always made sure I was ok.

My biological father was murdered, I was 5. After his death, my mother had two extremely abusive relationships. Joe, my first stepfather, used to beat me and my mother almost nightly for the most trivial shit, no warning. I was 8, I fought back as much as I could until I was in so much pain I couldn’t move. She finally “left” him after she was hospitalized by him, hitting her in the head with a coffee cup and had the mug handle lodged inside her skull that I frantically tried to dig out. I was moved to my grandmother on my father’s side for a few years, until my mom got her life together and kidnapped me from her after she found out about the neglect and her stealing the money my mom was sending to her for me.

My second stepfather Tony, started out fantastic, always helped me with homework, cooked with me, and I felt happy with him. We’d all listen to the Beatles on the record player and dance together. I started to pick up on behavior patterns he did that matched Joe’s, they were both narcissists. My mom used to watch Tony’s bosses’ kid all the time, so she was always at the house. We were best friends. Tony and my Mom used to argue a lot, it never got overly aggressive, but it still made me and my friend really uneasy. One night it got really loud, and we had checked in on what was going on. Tony was beating my mom in the basement; he had knocked her completely out and yet still proceeded to beat her. I grabbed his crowbar, which he always “playfully” threatened to beat her with, then started to hit him with it repeatedly out of rage and fear, I was 12. I pierced his neck and broke a lot of bones. My friend was horrified screaming, my mom woke up and freaked out. She asked me why I did it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to answer that question. I helped my mom drag him to his car out front, we were both covered in blood, then she told me to grab all the blankets in the house I could find. She drove him around to th

To Have and Have Not (1944) - MAP: 92.31/100

IMDb / Wikipedia / My Collection

Was you ever bit by a dead bee?

A fishing boat bobs along the blue hills and valleys of the ocean waves as the men aboard pit their skill against those creatures unlucky enough to cross paths with them. It’s tense, these expeditions always are, and the two men have been sparring and short with one another. It sounds like the beginning of the film but it’s actually the story of how the process that lead to the film began.

Independent filmmaker Howard Hawks was on a 10-day fishing trip with Ernest Hemingway and working overtime trying to convince the famous author to change his longtime stance and work for Hollywood. Hawks said he’d turn his worst book into a film. Hemingway finally consented and the two worked on the screenplay that would eventually become the endlessly quotable film To Have and Have Not. I understand the book and the film bear very little resemblance to one another.

The film centers on Harry “Steve” Morgan, an American in Martinique who charters his boat to sports fishermen during a tough period in French history. The port city of Fort-de-France has come under the thumb of brutal Vichy French officials. Harry is determined to steer clear of any political troubles but, if you’ve seen any good Bogart film, you know trouble had a way of finding him. It’s not long until Harry is helping smuggle the wrong sorts into Martinique with the help of his loyal friend Eddie (Walter Brennan), a near helpless rummy whose age and drunkenness is a lightning rod for the ire of unkind people the island over.

By film’s end, reluctant Harry has managed to piss every official off, helped the French Resistance, and won the girl - a cool as ice Lauren Bacall. With little effort she drops lines that are breadcrumbs that lead you to what she wants but the Hayes Code wont let her say like, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together… and blow.” Helen of Troy didn’t have half as many admirers as Bacall.

If it’s not obvious by the MAP alone, this is my sort of film. I love the style of it, the juxtaposition of raw grit and intelligent beauty. The film holds true to authentic American values - hesitant to get into a fight but a hellcat once cornered, I think the last 50 o

Or would that be too forward thinking?

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.

And boy are my arms legs.

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "

Hindus, on the other hand, never had any beef.

I won't be doing that today!

This morning, my 4 year old daughter.

Daughter: I'm hungry

Me: nerves building, smile widening

Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.

She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.

Thank you all for listening.

[Removed]

When I got home, they were still there.

There hasn't been a post all year!