Card and board games.
Pick your game: Macao, Seven Cut, Sweep, Liar Liar, War, Poker, Backgammon, Tile Rummy or Chess. House rules, written exactly as the server applies them — what you read here is what happens at the table, not a rough description of the game “in general.”
Which game suits you.
The nine aren’t variations on one thing. War has no decisions at all and takes two minutes to learn; Sweep asks for arithmetic on every move. Between them sit Macao, the most played in Romania; Seven Cut, where everything turns on when you spend your cut; and Liar Liar, where the cards matter less than the face you make playing them. Poker is played as a tournament: you don’t win a hand, you end up the last one with points. And three are played without cards: Backgammon, with two dice, fifteen pieces and a single opponent; Tile Rummy, with numbered tiles you gather into runs and sets until you’re rid of them all; and Chess, the only one where luck has no say at all.
| Game | Players | Length | What it asks of you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Macao rules | 2–6 | 10–20 min | Attention to what’s been played |
| Seven Cut rules | 2–4 | 10–15 min | Memory and patience |
| Sweep rules | 2–4 | 20–30 min | Arithmetic, on every move |
| Liar Liar rules | 2–6 | 15–25 min | Reading your opponent |
| War rules | 2 | 5–15 min | Nothing — just luck |
| Poker rules | 2–6 | 30–90 min | Patience and a cool head |
| Backgammon rules | 2 | 5–30 min | Arithmetic, dice in hand |
| Tile Rummy rules | 2–4 | 10–60 min | Patience, and an eye on the discards |
| Chess rules | 2 | 5–30 min | Calculation, a few moves ahead |
If there are two of you
War, if you’d rather not think at all. Sweep, if you would. Macao works with two as well, but it’s a different game than with six: penalties come straight back to you. And Backgammon is only ever played by two.
If there are many of you
Macao, Liar Liar and Poker each seat six. All three get better the more of you there are — Liar Liar because it’s harder to read who’s lying, Macao because penalties travel around the table, Poker because a good hand with two players is an average one with six.
If you don’t know any of them
Start with War: five minutes and no rules to remember. Then Macao, the game nearly everyone in Romania knows.
If you’re short of players
The host can put bots in the empty seats, at two levels. The table then drops off the leaderboard — a bot has no rating to stake — but the match plays the same.