Game Play
A shuffled pack of 54 cards is dealt to three players. Each player is dealt 17 cards each, with the last three leftover "kitty" cards detained on the playing desk, face down.
All players first review and appraise their own cards without showing their cards to the other players. Then, players take turns to bid for the Landlord position by telling the other players the risk stake they are willing to accept.
There are three kinds of risk stakes, 1, 2, and 3, with 1 being the lowest and 3 being the highest. Generally, the more confident a player is in the strength of one's cards, the higher the risk stakes one is willing to bid. In most of the online game rooms, the first bidder is chosen randomly by the system. In reality, players usually make up their own rules as to who gets to bid first.
A player may accept the prior player's bid by passing their turn to bid or one may try to outbid the prior player as long as the prior player did not bet 3 as the risk stake. In other words, 1 can be outbid by 2 or 3; 2 can only be outbid by 3; and 3 cannot be outbid.
The highest bidder takes the Landlord position; and the remaining players enter the Farmer team competing against the Landlord. The three leftover wild cards are then revealed to all players before dealt to the Landlord.
The Landlord wins if he or she has no cards left. The Farmer team wins if either of the Farmers have no cards left.
Read more about this topic: Dou Di Zhu
Famous quotes containing the words game and/or play:
“Wild Bill was indulging in his favorite pastime of a friendly game of cards in the old No. 10 saloon. For the second time in his career, he was sitting with his back to an open door. Jack McCall walked in, shot him through the back of the head, and rushed from the place, only to be captured shortly afterward. Wild Bill’s dead hand held aces and eights, and from that time on this has been known in the West as “the dead man’s hand.””
—State of South Dakota, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imperative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.”
—Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958)