Remember When

Bastardizations

9apr2009: In high school, circa 1990, EF, KK, and I made up a family of trick-taking cardgames for three players. In each of the games, some number of cards are set aside. We started calling the extra hand of cards the bastard, and so we called the original game Bastard. The wackier variants got names like Mega Bastard and Nuisance Bastard. (I've left EF and KK as initials in case they don't want internet searches for them leading to this anecdote.)

At some point in this century, I began writing down the rules for Bastard. I didn't finish, so the file sat on my harddrive, migrating with other documents to new computers. Recently I stumbled across the mostly finished rules and posted them.

Here it is: Bastard, an illegitimate child of Whist.

On a related note, it's been a little over a year since I first released the Decktet. My thought then was that it could do no worse on the web than it did slumbering on my harddrive. Since then, it has become a modest success. There are eighteen Decktet games in the BGG database. There are more at the Decktet wiki, including some written or translated into Spanish.