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You should play a lot of hands, or organise a tournament, for Figgie to really make sense. It's fun but I prefer to play in person.


How do you play in person? Are the cards for sale somewhere?


Just a normal deck is fine, you have to prepare it but it’s not a big deal.


I think that is kind of a big deal. You either need to prepare many identical decks in advance or come up with an elaborate selection procedure you repeat every 4 minutes.


I don't think it would be too hard. After the round players throw their cards in by suit face up to 4 piles, every suit gets topped up to 12 cards. Have one person take all four suits under the table and then hands them in random order to the dealer. The dealer randomizes them themselves so nobody can know which suit is which, then removes the required number of cards from the random suits and discards them, and shuffles the deck.

Obviously it isn't super quick, but once people know whats going on it doesn't take that long either.


Just switch dealers each round and have them sit out...


I assume this was originally played with normal decks, but the screenshots show special decks with only suits.

Doesn't this make a difference to gameplay? With normal suits, if you trade a few times, you may be able to establish that twelve distinct cards are in a suit even though you never saw more than say four of them at once

Maybe there typically isn't enough trading for this to make a difference? If there is, it does introduce an extra skill to the game of remembering the cards that have been seen before. That's valuable in lots of card games including some poker variants, but it doesn't seem like something JS would emphasize training.

If you have 12 identical decks you can turn them into 13 Figgie decks by combining all the cards of each value.




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