I’ve come to a rather striking (at least given my past thinking on the matter) conclusion over the past few months: Oh Hell is the greatest card game ever invented. By far. And by that I mean “it’s the most fun game that you will want to regularly play and will be able to regularly play.” Let me explain.

I like to play card games. I’m not talking about poker. (I like that, too, but as they say, Bridge is a card game you can gamble on; poker is a gambling game you play with cards.) I’m talking about real card games: Bridge, Whist, Pitch, Rummy, All Fours, Hearts, Spades, Catch the Ten, and so forth. But I constantly run into a very frustrating situation: I don’t know a lot of other people who like card games as much as I do, and even when I do find myself in a situation with the right people, a lot of game simply “don’t work” for one reason or another: people don’t know how to play, don’t like certain games, etc. As it turns out, most card games do not have the right ingredients to be spontaneously played when the moment strikes a group of people.

So what are the ingredients of a great card game? I would venture that there are four (or five).

1a) Meaningfully complex strategy. This is by far the most important ingredient to any card game. Any decent card game has to provide positive feedback for skillful play; making better decisions than the other players should usually result in victory. I say usually because all card games have an element of luck; the best games are ones in which the the time horizon for long-term skill to overtake short-term luck is short enough to allow better players to win over the course of a game, but also so that weaker players receive a negative feedback for poor strategy. So, ceteris parabis, the more strategic decision points, the better. In any case, at a bare minimum, there has so be some strategic choice involved in the game. Otherwise, no matter how you dress it up, you’re just playing War or Klondike solitaire. Good for passing the time, but not much else. Or maybe you’re just playing Speed or Spit, which are fun but not really strategy games.

1b) Unstable strategy. Closely related to strategy complexity is what I call strategy instability. A game with a stable strategy is one in which you can devise your strategy either prior to the cards even being dealt, or right after they are initially dealt, without worrying too much about having to adjust them during the course of the game in response to your opponents actions. This is partially the downfall of a game like full-books Go Fish or Palace: you get your hand, you watch what cards your opponents plays, but you really don’t need to react strategically to all that much. On the other end of the spectrum, games like Bridge and Whist require not only careful attention to what your opponent is doing, but a rethinking of your strategy based on what they are doing.

2) Rule simplicity. This is the death knell of so many card games, and particularly ones that satisfy the conditions of strategy complexity and instability. If a game can’t be taught to new players in 10 minutes or less, you’re not going to play it that often. This is, far and away, the downfall of Bridge. I spent the better part of two hours a few weeks ago teaching some smart and relatively card-savvy people how to play Bridge, and we still never got around to playing a real game that first night. Just awful. Same with Wisconsin Skat. I’m pretty sure that would be one of the most popular three-person card games in the world, if it didn’t take half the night to teach it to someone.

3) Scalable participants. Nothing is worse than wanting to play one of the great partnership games (Bridge, Bid Whist, Partnership Spades, or even Gabes(!)) and having either just 3 people or, even worse, 5 people. The games that scale are much, much better. Mostly because you have a lot more opportunities to play them.

4) Little down-time. This is the downfall of Pitch, which otherwise would be an amazing game. Way to often, you are barely participating, because you got dealt a junk hand, had no plausible chance of bidding, and during the play you’re cards are so bad that you’re nothing more than an automaton tossing junk into each trick. In effect, all of the strategic complexity disappears, because your hand is so bad that it requires no strategy to play it. A surprising number of games are like this, and it’s a major problem. Bridge suffers from the same problem with the dummy; you can end up sitting out hand after hand if your partner keeps winning bids.

5) Tricks and trumps. When you cut to the chase, there are really only two strategic card games: Rummy and Whist. Almost everything else is just a variation on one of those two. After 30 years of playing card games, I’ve still never found a Rummy variation that can compete with any of the top Whist variations. Perhaps this is more of an opinion or personal preference, but the element of tricks and trumps simply dominates on the level of strategic complexity.

So this is where Oh Hell comes to the rescue. If you know how to play any game that uses tricks and trump, I can teach you how to play in less than two minutes: X rounds, in the first round each player gets 3 cards, second 4, and so forth, up to the maximum the number of players can accommodate , an then back down. In each round, after the deal, a card from the deck is flipped for trump. After that, starting left of the dealer, players make a single bid on exactly how many tricks they will win. The dealer cannot bid a number of tricks such that total bids equal total tricks. After the bids, left of the dealer leads and players must follow suit if they can. Trick winner leads next trick. After all tricks played, players who made exactly their bid score (10+bid) or (5 + round #) if they bid zero tricks, everyone else scores zero. Most points at the end of all rounds win.

The beauty of the game is that it satisfies all conditions for a great card game. Obviously, it’s a tricks and trumps game. And you can play with any number of players 3 to 7 (or more if you modify the number of rounds). But the real beauty is that there’s zero down-time. Since each person’s objective is to correctly evaluate the exact number of tricks they can take and then execute that evaluation, the absolute strength/weakness of your hand is of utterly no consequence to the playing of the hand. It is pure genius, because it completely wipes out the boredom of getting bad hands over and over again, as well as the complaints that people are getting “dealt bad cards.” Bad situations can still arise strategically, but there’s no such thing as a bad hand out of the gate.

And, of course, the strategy. Good lord, the strategy. I’ve never met another game that plays and feels like a cross between bride and poker, but this one does. In one sense, you have to plan your tricks out, like Bridge, before the hand starts playing out. But inevitably, the actions of the other players will affect which cards in your hand are the winners and losers, and thus which cards you need to win with and which cards you need to dump. And thus it is often the case that you end up pitching an Ace away on other-led suits, only to later win tricks with trash cards. Like Bridge, you often spend a lot of time pondering how you are going to lose control and then gain it back. But like poker, there a lot of room for bluff-like moves, especially ducking tricks. It’s the most strategically-dynamic card game I’ve ever played.  Even the bidding requires some interesting thinking and tactics, especially in the early/late rounds, when you hold very few cards in your hand.

Oh Hell also has more “eureka” moments than any other card game. It’s the kind of game that makes you feel brilliant, and makes you marvel at other people’s brilliance. In the end, it’s one of the few games that leaves everyone at the table smiling.