SHITHEAD

Shithead Rules

These are the rules that I have always used playing Shithead. There are many variations possible, so this might not be exactly how you are used to playing the game.

1. The purpose of Shithead is to lose all your cards by putting them on the pile. A card that is put on the pile must be equal or higher than the top card of the pile.
2. If you have no card to put on the pile you must take the entire pile, and it's the opponents turn.
3. There are always three cards in your hand, if you have less than three you must draw enough cards from the deck to get three again. After the deck is finished no more cards are drawn.
4. There are three downwards facing cards and three upwards facing cards on the table. You cannot play them until your hand is finished. You cannot look at a downward facing card before playing it.
5. Before you start you can exchange cards from your hand with the upwards facing cards on the table.
6. You can put a two on top of everything, it is the restart card.
7. You can put a five on top of everything, it is the reverse card, meaning that in the next turn the opponent must put a card equal or lower than five.
8. You can put a ten on top of everything and it burns the pile, and you get to put out the first card in the new pile.
9. You can put out more than one card at a time as long as they have the same rank. Do this by right clicking on the cards to select them and then left click on one of them to play them all together. If you are playing on an iPad or another tablet you can click a card and hold the finger on it for a second, then it will be selected. Select the ones you want to play together, and then tap on one of them to play them all together.
10. If there are four cards with the same rank at the top of the pile then the pile is removed.
11. If you have no card that you can put on top of the pile then you may draw the top card of the deck and put on the pile, if it is a legal move then you do not have to take the pile.
12. You can always choose to take the pile instead of playing a card. You can also always play the top card on the deck blindly onto the pile.

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About Shithead

This online version of Shithead was made by me. My name is Einar Egilsson and over there on the left is my current Facebook profile picture! (Maybe I shouldn't have put my picture so close to the 'About Shithead' headline! Oh well.) A while ago I wanted to learn how to make simple browser games, Shithead is my favorite card game, and so that's what I made!

Since I have no artistic talent whatsoever I used graphics that I found at OpenClipArt, a great site with free graphics. The excellent playing card images were made by Nicu Buculei, check out his site for some more examples of his work. He has lots of great free graphics.

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