The Gou Ji card game, online, with friends or the computer

What Gou Ji is, and what the sources disagree on

Gou Ji (also spelled Gouji) is a Chinese card game from Qingdao, a port city on the coast of Shandong province. It belongs to the climbing card games, where every play has to top the one before it or you pass. Pagat, the card-game reference we lean on, calls it a complex six-player team game. Six people sit in two teams of three, alternately, so every seat has opponents on both sides and one straight across. That last opponent is your Dui Men, and much of the game is about them.

Nobody agrees on the year. Pagat says the game was developed after the Cultural Revolution, and points to its vocabulary: the right to start the play in a new game is called going to work, and the winners drive the head car and the second car. Wikipedia's stub says 1962 and 1963, in Licang District. Baidu Baike's English page says the early 1960s, in Qingdao's Cangkou area, and that it spread across Shandong in the 1980s. We will not pick a year. All three say Qingdao, and Pagat adds that climbing games are widespread in China.

Which Gou Ji rules we deal, and where others differ

Gou Ji has many regional rule sets, and the English sources document one. We deal the one on Pagat, written by John McLeod and Tony Hellman with help from a regular player. Baidu Baike's English page lists rules that were not in the original Qingdao game and grew up elsewhere in Shandong: opening points, blocking threes and fours, buying threes and fours, and several kinds of tribute, with Jinan's rules called the most complex. If your family plays one of those, this table will not match it.

Where Pagat leaves a gap, we chose. Pagat implies that a lead can start a duel, and our table plays it that way. Tribute is paid automatically from the highest cards, and whoever receives it picks what to send back. A hand ends at once if one side takes the first three places, because the score is fixed by then. Any other hand is played until one seat is left. Then there is what we left out, all of it things people work out between them at a real table: a Shao Pai, where an opponent holding just two sets steps in for your Dui Men, a Rang Pai, where you ask a team-mate to pass, free order once four seats remain, tribute waivers, role swaps and showing your hand. We did not build a way to.

Gou Ji card game rules, with a duel worked through

Four 54-card packs make 216 cards, all dealt out. High to low: Red joker, Black joker, 2, ace, king, queen, jack, then 10 down to 3. Twos and jokers are wild and can join any set. A play is one card or a set of equal ranks. Each seat in turn must beat the previous play with the same number of cards, higher, or pass. A pass lasts until the cards are cleared, and when everyone else has passed, the last to play leads again. Equal never beats, so 6-6-2-2 and 6-6-6-6 stand off. That is all the climbing there is.

Now the part the name comes from. Play a high enough set and the table stops going round. High enough means five tens, four jacks, three queens, two kings or two aces, with wild cards counting. It also means any set made only of wild cards, and any set with a joker in it, though a set with a Red joker cannot be beaten, so the trick simply closes. Otherwise only the seat across from you may answer, by beating it or passing, and the two of you trade blows until one passes. The other leads. That is a gou ji, a duel.

A worked one, in the room's seat names: the host, then guest 1 to 5 round the table. Guest 1 leads 10-10-10, only three tens, so nobody is stopped. Guest 2 beats it with Q-2-2, three queens counting the twos, which is high enough. Guest 5 sits across from guest 2 and still has cards, so only guest 5 may answer, and plays K-K-2. Guest 2 plays A-A-Black joker. Guest 5 can beat that only with a wild set holding a Red joker, say 2-2-Red, and a Red closes the trick, so guest 5 would lead. Without one, guest 5 passes and guest 2 leads again. Either way the host, guest 3 and guest 4 never got a turn on it. The four plays are Pagat's own example.

First out scores 4 for their side and second 2, third and fourth nothing, while fifth costs the side 2 and sixth 4. Take first, fourth and fifth and your side nets 2 while the other loses 2. Take first, second and third and it is a sweep, worth 12 to minus 12. After every deal each seat presses Play this hand, and a seat with no 2 and no joker may call a revolution instead, which deals everything again with no tribute. After an ordinary hand the sixth place sends its two highest cards to the winner and the fifth place one to the runner-up, and each gets cards back. After a sweep each loser pays one card to the seat across.

Gou Ji card game online: a room for six, or you and five computers

It needs six. Set up a table and the lobby gives you five invite links, one per seat. Whoever opens a link takes that seat: no account, no download. You choose how long a match is, 3, 6 or 12 hands, and voice is opt-in. A room takes six people and nobody else, no computer seats and no starting short-handed. A table stays open until 48 hours after its last move.

Cannot find five people tonight? Press Play the computer. You take the first seat with two computers as your team, against three, and the computer across the table is your Dui Men. A hand is already dealt when the page loads. Pause stops the computers while you read the board, and you can pick a match length, start a new match or switch on high contrast.

Your hand is not thirty-six cards fanned across a phone. It is fifteen groups, three to ace, then twos, Black jokers and Red jokers, each a card face with a count. Tap a group to pick its rank, use the steppers for how many and to add twos or jokers, and the line under it says whether the set beats the one on the table, or why it does not. The board says whose move it is, what just happened, and who is in a duel. A seat's count shows once it is ten or fewer, and "more than 10" before that.

How long a match takes, and why people take longer

We had the computer play all six seats for more than 3,600 hands. A hand came to about 87 plays and 35 passes. At six seconds a play, two a pass and five for each pick-up or tribute step, that is about ten minutes a hand, so the default of six hands is about an hour. That is the computer's pace. A real table of people runs longer than that measurement, because people stop to think and to talk and the computer does not. Pick 3 hands if you want a shorter evening, or 12 if you want a long one.

Gou Ji card game PDF? No, but here are the words you will meet

There is no Gou Ji card game PDF here and nothing to print: the rules are on this page, the how-to page plays a hand out, and Pagat's page has the full text with a longer glossary. The words are half the fun, so here are the ones you will hear at a real table.

Gou Ji (够级) means reaching the level, as one founder is quoted on Baidu Baike, and Pagat's glossary adds that joker, 2, ace, king, queen, jack and 10 are the ranking cards that can add up to a high enough play. Your Dui Men (对门) is the opponent opposite. Tribute is Jin Gong (进贡) and a revolution is Ge Ming (革命). Holding all four Red jokers, so that you pay no tribute, is Jie Fang (解放), liberation. Going out and letting the next seat lead is Jie Feng (接风), catching the wind, and Shang Ban (上班), going to work, is the right to start the play in a new game.

How the computers play

We think the computers move the way a careful beginner should, and you can watch it happen. On a lead a computer plays out its whole hand if that is one set, or else the biggest group nobody can still beat, judged from the ranks already played, or else its lowest rank, every copy of it. From a big hand it will not lead a set that would start a duel. On an answer it goes out if it can, even over a team-mate's set. Otherwise it plays the cheapest set of the right size, with a price on every wild card and on splitting a bigger group, so twos and jokers stay in hand until they are the cheapest way to win.

In a duel it keeps answering while the seat across shows ten or fewer cards, and it plays a Red joker into one only then, or when it is down to eight cards. Against a bigger hand it passes when only wild cards would answer. It counts the ranks already played, and when it receives tribute it sends back its lowest cards. A computer declares a revolution whenever it may, since Pagat gives no rule for when and we did not invent one.

Our view, and the limits

It is a team card game for six, so it needs six people and the better part of an hour for a match, and one weak hand costs all three of a side. That is the honest catch. Another: while a duel runs, the other four seats just watch. What you get for it is the duel itself, two seats across the table settling a trick between them, and in our opinion that is the point of the game. The best card game with friends is the one where you all know the rules, or none of you does, and a table that refuses an illegal play and says why keeps everyone on the same footing.

The points are only points. Nothing is bet, and nothing carries over between tables. It is free, like everything here, with the occasional discreet ad.