Nerts
Nerts (also called Pounce or Racing Demon) is solitaire as a full-contact sport. Up to six players play simultaneously from their own decks onto shared foundations, each trying to be first to empty a thirteen-card Nerts pile and slam the table. Scoring runs across hands to a target you set, so a bad round can be clawed back — if you can keep up with everyone else's hands landing on the same piles.
- Players
- 2–6
- Playing time
- 15 min
- Decks
- One each
- Ages
- 10 to adult
How it's played
Everybody plays their own game of solitaire, out loud, into the same middle, at the same time. There are no turns and nobody waits.
You bring your own fifty-two card deck and it goes into three places. Only one of them matters for ending the round.
13
Your Nerts pile
Face down but for the top card. Empty it and the round stops dead, for everybody.
4
Four work piles
One card each to start. Build them down in alternating colors, and move a run as a block.
35
Your stock
Turn it three at a time, as many times around as you like. Only the top one is live.
None of it is shared and none of it can be touched by anybody else. The only thing everyone reaches into is the middle.
The middle has no fixed size
There is no tidy row of four. A pile appears the moment somebody plays an ace, builds up in that suit, and belongs to nobody. With six players bringing six decks there are twenty-four aces, so there are up to twenty-four piles — several of them the same suit at once.
Nine open, fifteen still to come. An empty place takes any ace — it is not spoken for until one lands.
What you are allowed to do
- Anything can go to the middle. The top of your Nerts pile, the top of a work pile, the top of your waste — if it fits a foundation, it goes, and nobody can stop you but somebody faster.
- Feed the Nerts pile into your work piles. That is the whole technique. The middle takes cards in order; your work piles take them any time they fit, and that is how the pile actually goes down.
- An empty work pile takes anything. Not just a king — refill it from the Nerts pile and you have dug one card deeper.
- Stuck is not a turn ending. Turn three more and keep going. Nothing you do pauses anybody else.
Nerts!
The instant anybody's Nerts pile is empty they say so, and the round stops immediately — mid-reach, mid-move, everybody. Whatever was in your hand stays where it was.
And then it turns out that calling it is not the same as winning it.
How a round is scored
- Every card you got into the middle
- +1
- Every card still in your Nerts pile
- −2
The pile is priced at double. That is the whole of Nerts strategy in one line — and it is why the fastest player does not automatically take the round.
Priya emptied her pile and stopped the round with fourteen cards in the middle. Dana was three cards slower and took the round by six. Illustrative.
Scores carry from round to round, so a bad one can be clawed back. Deal again and keep going until somebody crosses the target — 100 by default, and you can set it before you start.
If everybody gets stuck at once the round ends the same way and is scored the same way. Nobody has to call anything for it to count.
If the room liked this
Classic Klondike Solitaire - host plays while others watch in real-time!
Tame eight legs of cards by building complete suit sequences from King to Ace.
Nothing is face down and almost every deal can be won. Four free cells hold cards aside while you unstack eight columns.