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Starvard University · Card and Parlor Games
Learn the games that fill a table and an evening, from Foster's Complete Hoyle: cribbage and its crib, whist, rummy, solitaire, dominoes, dice, and checkers, taught rule by rule so you can sit down and play tonight.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Card games look confusing until someone sits you down and deals you in. A long time ago a man named Edmund Hoyle wrote down the rules of the games everyone played, and his name became a promise that the rules were fair. In this course you will learn cribbage, whist, rummy, solitaire, dominoes, dice, and checkers, one simple game at a time, until your table is the one everyone gathers around.
Here is the secret hiding inside every game in this course: the rules are not there to make things complicated. They are there so that nobody has to argue. R. F. Foster, whose Complete Hoyle gathered hundreds of games into one big book, explained that most games were taught person to person at the table, and that every retelling quietly changed them. Writing the rules down, and agreeing to them before the first card is dealt, is what lets the fun start.
You need a deck of cards, two dice, a set of dominoes, and a checkerboard, and most homes already have all four. Each lesson teaches one game completely enough to play it the same evening: what you deal, what you are trying to do, how a turn works, and how the scoring goes. Start with cribbage if you have one partner, Klondike if you are alone, and save the last lesson for the night you host, because bringing people back around a table is the real subject of this course.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
You have probably heard someone settle an argument by saying a thing must be done according to Hoyle, as if Hoyle were a judge. R. F. Foster opens his Complete Hoyle by explaining how that happened. The word Hoyle, he writes, has gradually come to stand for an encyclopedia of indoor games, and the common expression played according to Hoyle usually means correctly played, or played according to the standard authorities. Behind the saying stands a real man. Edmund Hoyle wrote on very few games, Foster says, but his work was the first attempt to put together the rules for the most popular indoor games in one volume.
Hoyle died more than a hundred years before Foster wrote, yet editors kept adding new games to his book as they came into fashion. That, Foster notes dryly, has led many people to believe Hoyle is the authority for games he never heard of, such as pinochle and poker. The name outgrew the man and became a standard: a promise that somewhere there is a settled way to play, agreed by good players, that ends arguments before they start. When your table says according to Hoyle, that is the promise you are making to each other.
Foster also explains why the promise is needed. Most games, he observes, are learnt at the card table and not from books. A player shown a new game cannot remember all its details, and when he teaches it to others he invents rules to cover the points he has forgotten. His pupils pass the corrupted version on, each certain their way is right because it is how they have always played it. The cure is the habit this course is built on: write the rules down, agree them before the first deal, and let the book, not the loudest memory, referee.
Lesson 2
Every card game here uses the full pack of fifty two cards Foster describes for whist and cribbage alike: four suits of thirteen, ranking ace high, then king, queen, jack, and down to the two. Suits are equal unless a game makes one of them trumps. Before play, learn to read your hand at a glance: sort it by suit, alternate the colours so each card stands out, and fan it so only you can see the faces. Sorting does half a good player's thinking for them.
A fair shuffle mixes the cards so thoroughly that no one can know where any card lies, and Foster's games assume an honest one. Use whichever style your hands manage well. In an overhand shuffle, hold the pack in one hand and strip small packets off the top into the other hand until the pack has changed hands completely; repeat three or four times. In a riffle shuffle, split the pack in two, bend the ends up with your thumbs, let the cards fall interleaved, then push the halves together square. A sloppy, scattered pack slows every game and invites dropped and exposed cards.
Dealing has a small ceremony in Foster, and it is worth keeping because it prevents most disputes. The dealer presents the shuffled pack to another player to be cut: in whist that is the pone, the player on the dealer's right, and in cribbage the non dealer, who must leave at least six cards in each packet. The dealer then deals one card at a time, face down, in rotation starting with the player on the dealer's left, until the game number is reached, never dealing a second card to anyone before everyone has their first. If a card is found faced in the pack, or a player ends with the wrong count, Foster calls it a misdeal and the honest fix is simple: gather the cards and deal again.
Lesson 3
The rummy family is built on one satisfying idea: collecting matching groups. A set is three or four cards of the same rank, like three sevens. A run is three or more cards of the same suit in sequence, like the four, five, and six of hearts. Foster does not describe a game under the rummy name, which spread later, but he gives the family its ancestor in full: Conquian, a great favourite in Mexico and Texas, played with a forty card pack. In Conquian each player is dealt ten cards and races to be first to lay down eleven cards in triplets and sequences combined with cards drawn from the stock. Modern rummy is that same race, run with a full deck and a discard pile.
Here is basic rummy, the version to teach your table. Two players take ten cards each; with three or four players, deal seven. Turn one card up to start the discard pile and set the rest face down as the stock. On your turn, draw the top card of the stock or the top card of the discard pile. If you hold a set or a run of three or more, you may lay it face up in front of you; this is called melding. You may also add cards to melds already on the table, your own or anyone else's, which is laying off. End your turn by placing one card on the discard pile. The first player to meld or lay off every card, finishing with a final discard, goes out and wins the hand.
Score the hand simply, and agree the numbers before you start, in the Hoyle spirit. The winner scores the value of the cards still stuck in everyone else's hands: court cards count ten each, aces count fifteen in some houses and one or eleven in others, and other cards count face value, which is why your table's first written agreement should name the ace. Play to an agreed total, often one hundred points. Keep two habits from Conquian, which Foster praised for demanding close attention and a good memory: watch what your opponent picks up from the discard pile, because it announces what they are collecting, and never feed that suit or rank back if you can help it.
Lesson 4
Cribbage, Foster writes, is not only one of the oldest games on the cards but quite unlike any other, in both its play and its reckoning, and it is a game of judgment rather than memory. Two players, a full pack, and a board with two pegs each. Foster's game is sixty one points: peg down one row of thirty holes and back, then land the extra step into the game hole. One honest update: most modern boards run two laps and play to one hundred and twenty one points, with exactly the same rules, so agree your target before the first deal. Six cards are dealt to each player. Each of you discards two cards face down to form the crib, a spare four card hand belonging to the dealer. Give the crib nothing helpful when it is not yours, and feed it gladly when it is.
The non dealer cuts the pack, and the dealer turns up the top card of the lower packet: this is the starter, and it counts as part of every hand and the crib. If the starter is a jack, the dealer immediately pegs two points for his heels, and must claim them before playing a card or they are lost. Now the play. You take turns laying cards face up, keeping a running total, and you may not pass thirty one. Points fall out as you go: making the total exactly fifteen scores two, a pair scores two, three of a kind scores six, four scores twelve, and a run of three or more cards in any order scores one per card. The player who plays the last card scores one for last card, or two if it lands exactly on thirty one. When neither of you can play without passing thirty one, the hand resets to zero and the player who did not play last leads the next round.
When the cards are spent, count the hands in a fixed order: non dealer's hand first, then the dealer's, then the crib, each combined with the starter to make five cards. Count every pair of cards totalling fifteen for two points each, pairs for two, three of a kind for six, four for twelve, runs at one per card, and a flush of four in hand for four, or five if the starter matches; a crib flush counts only when all five match, for five. A jack of the same suit as the starter, held in hand or crib, is his nobs, worth one point. Learn the famous summit: three fives and a jack, with the fourth five, matching the jack's suit, as starter, counts twenty nine: eight fifteens, twelve for the four fives, and his nobs. Deal passes left, and the first peg home wins.
Lesson 5
Whist is the great partnership game from which bridge grew, and Foster gives it the full treatment of a game governed by club laws. Four players sit as two partners across from each other. The whole pack is dealt, thirteen cards each, one at a time, and in Foster's whist the dealer turns the very last card face up on the table: its suit is trumps for that hand, the suit that beats all others. The player on the dealer's left leads any card to the first trick. Each player in turn must follow suit, play a card of the suit led, if they possibly can. Failing to follow suit while holding one is revoking, and the laws fine it tricks. A player with none of the suit led may either trump in or discard something useless.
The highest card of the suit led wins the trick, unless a trump has been played, in which case the highest trump wins it. The winner gathers the four cards and leads to the next trick. Thirteen tricks make the hand. Each side first needs six tricks, called the book; every trick beyond six scores one point, and the side reaching the agreed game total, commonly five points in the short club game of Foster's era, wins the game. Three habits from the old whist masters will win you more tricks than luck: second hand plays low, keeping strength in reserve; third hand plays high, trying to win the trick for partner; and when your partner's suit is known, lead it back to them, because partnerships win whist, not individuals.
Now watch what time did to this game: you are looking at the family tree of bridge. Whist fixed the trump by chance, by turning a card. Bridge whist let the dealer choose the trump, and introduced the exposed dummy hand played by one partner. Auction bridge, which fills a long chapter of Foster, made the players bid for the right to name trumps. Contract bridge, which arrived after Foster, kept the bidding and dummy but scored only the tricks a side had contracted to win. Learn whist first, and bridge stops being a mystery: it is whist with an auction in front of it and a contract to fulfil.
Lesson 6
Solitaire, or patience, is the family of card games for a single player, and Foster collects a whole shelf of them. The one the world settled on is Klondike, and it is worth learning in his exact layout, because the setup is the game. Shuffle the full pack. Deal a row of seven piles: the first pile gets one card face up; the second gets one card face down plus one face up on top of it; the third gets two face down and one face up; and so on across, until the seventh pile has six cards face down under its one face up card. Seven cards will be showing and twenty eight cards are on the table. The remaining twenty four cards form the stock in your hand.
Your aim is to build four foundation piles, one per suit, each beginning with an ace and rising in order to its king. Whenever an ace shows, lift it out to start its foundation row above the layout. On the layout itself, build downward in alternating colours: a red seven goes on a black eight, a black queen on a red king. Move single face up cards or whole face up sequences together. When a move uncovers a face down card, turn it up; that small reveal is the engine of the whole game. Only a king, alone or heading a sequence, may be placed in a space left empty in the layout.
When no layout move remains, work the stock the way Foster directs: run it off three cards at a time into a waste pile, playing the top waste card whenever it fits, and run through the pack again and again as long as any card can be used, without shuffling or rearranging it. Some tables make the game stricter: one card at a time, one pass only. Agree which game you are playing, Hoyle fashion, before you deal. Foster also warns that Klondike is sometimes mistakenly called Canfield; Canfield is different, with a reserve pile of thirteen and foundations starting from a dealt base card, and it is considerably harder to beat. The score in Klondike is how many cards you built onto the foundations, and a won game is all fifty two, kings on top.
Lesson 7
Three smaller worlds share this lesson, each needing only minutes to learn. Begin with dice and Foster's party game Ace in the Pot. Any number can play with two dice. Give every player two counters, and take turns throwing. Throw an ace on either die and you push one counter into the pot in the middle; two aces clears both. Throw a six and you pass a counter to the player on your left instead. Players with no counters are skipped. When only one counter remains outside the pot, its holder must throw three times in a row without any six appearing; succeed and the pool is yours, throw a six and the counter, and the ordeal, pass left. While you play, absorb the one dice fact Foster's chapter on chance works out in full: two dice make thirty six equally likely combinations, and seven, makeable six different ways, is the most likely total of all.
Dominoes uses the standard double six set Foster describes: twenty eight tiles, every pairing of numbers from blank to six twice over. Shuffle them face down, each player draws seven, and the rest form the stock, the boneyard. For the block game, the first player sets any tile, and each player in turn must place a tile whose end matches one open end of the line; doubles are laid crosswise. If you cannot match, in the block game you simply say go and lose the turn, which is why wise players, as Foster advises, open with a tile from their longest suit and keep steering the line back to it. A round ends when one player plays their last tile or the line is blocked; the winner scores the pips left in opponents' hands.
Checkers, or draughts, closes the lesson. Set the sixty four square board so each player has a light square at their right hand corner, and place twelve men each on the dark squares of the three rows nearest you. Men move one square diagonally forward onto an empty dark square. Capture by jumping: if an enemy man sits diagonally in front of you with an empty square just beyond, you must leap over it and remove it, and if the landing opens another jump, keep going in the same turn. A man that reaches the far row is crowned a king and may move and jump backward as well as forward. You win by capturing every enemy man or blocking your opponent so no legal move remains. Simple rules, and like everything in Foster, deep enough to study for a lifetime once the table gets serious.
Lesson 8
Everything Foster taught about how games go wrong is, read backward, a manual for hosting them well. Games decay when they are taught from imperfect memory, so the host's first job is to be the book for the evening: choose one main game, learn it properly from a written source, and teach it once, completely, before the first real hand. Name the house choices out loud as you teach: the target score, what the ace counts in rummy, whether cribbage runs to sixty one or one hundred and twenty one. A two minute rules talk at the start saves the twenty minute argument at the end, and it is exactly the agreement according to Hoyle that lesson one described.
Shape the evening for people, not for the games. Start with something fast and forgiving while everyone arrives, Ace in the Pot or a round of dominoes, where a new player can join mid stream. Move to the main game once the table is full, and build partnerships kindly: split the two strongest players onto opposite sides, and in whist or partnership cribbage rotate partners between games, so nobody spends the night as the weak half of a fixed pair. Keep drinks and sticky snacks on a side table rather than among the cards, and have pencils and a scoresheet ready so scoring, the second great source of friction, is somebody's clear job from the start.
End like a host who wants a second night. Finish at the hour you announced, and let the last thing people experience be a complete game and a good laugh rather than a fading table at midnight. Send everyone home with one small assignment: learn the game you will teach next time, from the book, and bring one question about it. That is how Foster's encyclopedia was meant to be used: not as a courtroom for settling who was right, but as the standing invitation that brings people back around the table, no screens needed.
Sources
This course is taught from a classic text that is free for anyone to read. Every rule in the lessons traces back to this book.
Graduation
You began with a name that became a promise about fair rules, and you finished able to deal, meld, peg, trump, build, and host. The games in this course have filled evenings for well over a century, and they ask for nothing but a deck, a table, and people you like. Shuffle up, agree the rules out loud, and deal. Congratulations, host.
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A note on accuracy: Much of what you read at Starvard was created with help from AI agents, working alongside people. We check what we can, but we cannot guarantee that everything here is true, current, or complete. If something really matters, your health, your money, a grade, a job, please verify it with a trusted source before you rely on it.