Playing cards: Challenge
By taiguy
@taiguy (478)
United States
March 31, 2007 2:23pm CST
When I was young my grandmaw tought me a really cool playing card game called "Challenge". Let see if I can explain it.
Use two decks combined together. Each player gets 20 cards face down in a pile i'll call the "life deck". Each player then gets 4 cards to use in their hand. You can only look at the top card of your life deck. The first person to have used all of the 20 cards in your life deck wins.
There are four piles in the middle of the table that both people play on. I will call these the "public piles". Each pile starts at ace, and goes from 1 to Queen. Kings are wild. Onece the pile has a queen (or king after a jack) on it the pile is shuffled into the draw deck.
At the start of each turn the player takes enough cards until they have four in their hand. Once you have four cards you attempt to use the cards in order to get rid of your life deck cards. Once you can play no more cards into the public piles you discard a card from your deck. If you cannot discard any cards (because you played them all) then you can take four cards from the draw deck and continue playing like it was the start of your turn. There is no requirement to play a card -- if you don't want to put down an ace because an opponent has a two on the top of their life deck then you don't have to. You can use any card out of your discard deck at any time during your turn.
I know it sounds kinda complicated, but once you play it is alot simpler and is alot of fun.
1 person likes this
2 responses
@Kappen (52)
• United States
2 Apr 07
If i'm reading this right, I used to play this all the time. As a matter of fact, if its the same thing I'm thinking of, there is actually a commercial game called "Skip-Bo" that's the same exact thing. Only difference being that their are numberd cards 1-12 instead of ace-queen.
Really fun game, me and my girlfriend play it all the time.
1 person likes this
@emeraldisle (13139)
• United States
2 Apr 07
This sounds a lot like what we call "Pride and Predjudice". It's played with 2 people although I have done it with 3 but it gets confusing. You use three decks though with ours. One deck per player and then one for drawing from. Each player has 5 cards in hand and then four rows they can discard down into infront of them. In the center is the playing area where you can have up to five piles going from Ace to King.
Each player starts out with five cards in hand, four down in front in single row and then the rest of their deck is to the side with the top card flipped over. The object of the game is to get rid of that deck. You play the cards in your hand and in your pile in order to get those from the deck out. Now you have to always discard which means you have to have 4 rows and one to place on top of another. If you can't then you can draw again and continue to play until you run out of moves. It can be a lot of fun. It's not hard to learn but it's hard to explain without being with the person in front of you.
