The great thing about card games is that it’s easy to keep a deck of cards, a pad of paper, and a pen in your pocket and be ready to play wherever you are. While board games are great, they’re a heck of a lot harder to carry around with you, and you’ll often need to teach the rules; with card games, however, there are a few classics that almost everyone knows.
Hearts is a great example; most people know how to play it, and for those who don’t, it’s easy to teach. Hearts is also a good introduction to the world of trick-taking games, leading to more complex games such as Spades (which uses a standard deck) and Tichu (which doesn’t).
Rummy is another old one..more accurately, it’s a number of similar games, where players attempt to make sets. While simpler versions are easily played by even young children, more complex versions like gin rummy are decided mainly by skill, with experienced players generally crushing newer players.
Probably the most popular card games these days, though, are comparing games. While this category includes a number of different card games, the most notable are the gambling games: blackjack and poker. Poker, of course, has a number of variations, from Texas Hold’Em to Omaha to Deuce or Better Triple Draw. In these games, players are competing to have the best “hand” of cards, and generally better on whether their hand will beat those of the other players (poker) or the dealer (blackjack). Ever since the explosion of the World Series of Poker a decade ago, these have become even more a part of everyday life in America.