sprat: multiplayer solitaire

I took a quick pass at describing the rules of a card game I grew up playing, Sprat:

Each player(or team) has 1 deck of cards. initial setup is 4 cards face up (the “personal piles”), 13 cards (top card face up, others face down) in the “sprat deck”, and the remaining cards in the “flip deck”.

The center of the table is the space for the “ace piles”. A new ace pile can be started by any player with any ace; any player can play the next card of the same suit on any ace pile.

Each player can move cards/stacks of cards within their personal piles as long as each card decreases the face value by 1 and alternates color. (solitaire style)

Each player flips through their flip deck 3 cards at a time and can play the top card on any ace piles or personal piles. (again, solitaire style)

The round is over when the first player eliminates their sprat deck. Rounds usually take 2-15 minutes, with the higher end being very rare for >= 3 players. The round score is then (player's cards in ace piles) - 2*(player's remaining sprat deck).

One game consists of several rounds; the game is over when the first player reaches 100 points.

I wrote a basic (read: not battle hardened) implementation of this as a semi-real-time game on github/traviscj/sprat. It’s barely good enough to play, but I’ve had a bit of fun playing it with some (non-local) family!

When I was writing up the code and trying to describe the rules to someone else, I discovered an identical game called Nertz, itself a variant of Canfield.