Mauer, Schneider, Leaster....

[elisem]

 If those sound familiar, you might have played sheepshead a time or two in your life.

In high school we played sheepshead at lunchtime. Once our school gained a commons room, we played it there whenever we were free, "we" being whoever wanted to play. The other day, I ran across a mention of the game. Hadn't thought of it in years. I've been listening to stuff about it, and it's coming back to me a bit. 

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has an article with a video.

(Also, when did they start calling the Milwaukee Journal the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel?)

Anyhow, did/do you play sheepshead? If yes, where and when did you learn? If no, what if any card games did/do you play?

Comments

[elisem]

And now I am amused because the link to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel took me to their page and a popup that assured me they would break down the Packers' playoff hopes. "Funny," I thought, "don't they break those down themselves?" Why yes, I grew up in Wisconsin, so I could say that. Then again, my folks met and married in Minnesota, which meant that when they said it, it sounded different. And I moved to Minnesota in the 1970s, so maybe I can't say it any more.

Still, that's what reflexes are, I guess.

[davidgoldfarb]

I've never heard of sheepshead before. I'm a fairly serious tournament bridge player. There's also a German designer who studied Chinese climbing card games and made his own version called Tichu; I'm not bad at that.

[cgbookcat1]

We all played Euchre in high school. I haven't heard of sheepshead before.

[mrissa]

I've never known anybody who didn't grow up in Wisconsin who did play Sheepshead. The only time I played it was when I was dating a guy from Wausau. (Mark grew up in Wisconsin to Michigander parents; he knows how to play Sheepshead but was not going to initiate it.) My perception is that the classic Sconnie games are Euchre and Sheepshead.

What we played in high school in lunch hours and vans to math contests and waiting for debate tournament results was either Bullshit or Egyptian Rat Screw. Which was called Egyptian Corkscrew in front of Jackie's mother, because then she wouldn't interpret it as rodents fucking and get upset about WHAT is it that you kids are doing again.

My junior year of college we played 500 like fiends. You don't really want to play 500 as my partner, my bids are...a little unhinged. My senior year we had played so much of it that even unhinged bids were starting to go stale, so we switched to Spades.

[light_of_summer]

I don't think I've ever heard of a Sheepshead card game, before. And I don't recall much card-playing, at all, in my high school, though it may have been happening in places or social circles where it wasn't obvious to me.

I did play three different kinds of solitaire, at home, in at least my first year of high school: Klondike (which I just learned as 'Solitaire'), Idiot's Delight, and one more that I've forgotten the name and rules of, which started by dealing out all 52 cards in four long non-overlapping rows.

As a younger kid, I recall playing quite a bit of Fish and Crazy Eights with my brother, mostly on long car trips, and I think my parents occasionally played those with us, too. I remember the Crazy Eights deck as being very visually appealing.

I think I played a little Authors and Old Maid, as a kid, too, but the depicted authors looked grim and I didn't like the misogyny and sense of social foreshadowing of Old Maid.

My parents mostly played Pinochle with my favorite aunt and uncle and two couples they socialized with. I learned a little bit about that game, but never really played it, myself.

As an adult, I've done very little card-playing with others. The only non-card game I've played more than a time or two with other adults has been Scrabble.

I've played a lot of computer Solitaire, over the years, and I've tried going back to cards, in an attempt to reduce my screen time, but that didn't prove satisfying for me.

For the last few years, my solo computer game of choice has been Mahjong Connect. And I've liked at least three other solo computer games where the objective is also to repeatedly spot two of a kind and to strategize how to legally remove them from the play area. I suspect that those kinds of games may give me lots of little dopamine hits, and that's why I like them.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[light_of_summer]

I went looking for the particular Crazy Eights art that I remembered, and I think what we had was the 1960s Watkins Strathmore deck. Best photo I can find is this one on Etsy, so who knows how long it'll be up: [link]

[elisem]

Cool deck!

[vcmw]

I've never played sheepshead and never heard of it before.

When I was a really little kid we played Go Fish and my mom taught me a bunch of solitaire layouts, all of which I have now forgotten.

When I was a slightly bigger little kid at home we all played pinochle, which we played with a single deck in small groups and a double deck in large family gatherings until my great-grandmother and one of my great-aunts got involved in a fight over pinochle (apparently they were both, in fact, cheating).

Other than that we played skip-bo and uno, and gin rummy.

In seventh grade everyone played poker during recess.

At summer camp we played Mao.

In college we played, oh, I think euchre sometimes and more often hearts at the bar?

Nowadays we usually play shithead or three thirteen, and occasionally Phase 10.

I was primed for sheepshead and euchre

[jesse_the_k]

before I moved to Wisconsin, where I indeed played it endlessly.

That's cause I visited my sister and her husband, who was doing anthropology in the Faroe Islands. They taught me the mysterious vocabulary in modern Faroese, which didn't stick. But I did become familiar with the unique 32-card pack.

In the student lounge at UW-Madison--called the Rathskeller, natch--there were designated euchre and sheepshead tables. Every place I worked had an ongoing lunchtime Euchre game, where players ritually grunted while slapping their cards on the table.

After playing that pack for years (but not for money), I stumbled on Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum, a very 20th century horror-fantasy packed with disability, geopolitics, Fascism, and people constantly playing skat, which is a more complicated 3-hand permutation of sheepshead.

Let's play sheepshead the next time we're in the same room!

Re: I was primed for sheepshead and euchre

[elisem]

Yes! Though I will need a refresher course.

(And I have been in that Rathseller.)