Lacombe
Louisiana
It was a dark and stormy night.
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We had some fun recently with an "adult" version of Temptation Terrapin.
In any Terrapin drinking game, it should be going Turtle Butt that signals a drink penalty.
In Temptation Terrapin [and most of the other versions, from how it seemed reading them], there's little incentive to ever reveal a Turtle Butt hand, which isn't much fun.
In a drinking version of the game, it should be a dramatic moment when you've gone Turtle Butt and have to take a drink, and everyone should be able to tell when it happens.
What we did was to change the face-up / face-down rules of the game slightly, as follows:
- Everyone gets their 2 face-down cards, and you flip 3 face-up table cards.
- Every other card you take is taken face-up rather than face-down.
- If you get a Turtle Butt hand between your face-up cards [only] and the table cards, you're immediately out of the hand and must take a drink.
- After everyone's done going Turtle Butt or passing on further cards, do the "pay in" variant listed in the Decktet book [we only made the pay-in cost 1 Ducat].
- Once everyone has decided whether to pay to play, continue with the showdown.
- Do the showdown in turn order. If you have Turtle Butt or just don't think you will win, you can fold your hand [no drink]. Otherwise, reveal it and score.
- If all but the last player pass in the showdown, the last player must reveal their hand. If it's Turtle Butt, they drink [two drinks?]; otherwise, they win.
[It wasn't really clear from the rules what happened in a number of situations:
- How does the showdown work, exactly? Must you reveal to win [as above?]?
- About how many Ducats should there be between all the players? We used 12, which was too few given the antes / buy-ins, which we reduced to 2 and 1, respectively, from 3 and 3.
- What happens if you're playing the pay-to-play variant, but you have no coins?
We house-ruled on the latter that if on your turn, you have at least 1 Ducat, but not enough for your next drawn card--or not enough to buy-in to the showdown--that you can pay all the Ducats you have remaining, take 1 further draw from the deck, and effectively go "all-in" to the showdown. This worked just fine, it seemed.]
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P.D. Magnus
United States
Albany
New York
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I'm glad you enjoyed it.
NateStraight wrote:
- How does the showdown work, exactly? Must you reveal to win [as above?]?
Yes. In the usual game: If you refuse to show your cards, then you can't win. It's just as if you've shown Turtlebutt.
Quote:
About how many Ducats should there be between all the players? We used 12, which was too few given the antes / buy-ins, which we reduced to 2 and 1, respectively, from 3 and 3.
We start each player with about 75 ducats. No one goes bust, and players' totals just serve to keep score.
As with any open-ended betting game, you can instead play with players going bust until there is only one player left. Limiting the number of ducats each player gets will make people go bust faster.
Quote:
What happens if you're playing the pay-to-play variant, but you have no coins?
There isn't an official rule, just the usual options for betting games. Your way of letting players go all in seems good.
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Lacombe
Louisiana
It was a dark and stormy night.
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pmagnus wrote:
We start each player with about 75 ducats.
Wow. Yikes.
[I had meant to put 12 per player, but this is still an order of magnitude lower.
Quote: No one goes bust, and players' totals just serve to keep score.
As with any open-ended betting game, you can instead play with players going bust until there is only one player left. Limiting the number of ducats each player gets will make people go bust faster.
We played until there were only two players left. Our antes / buy-ins weren't high enough that the game would have progressed very interestingly at all past that point.
Quote: Quote:
What happens if you're playing the pay-to-play variant, but you have no coins?
There isn't an official rule, just the usual options for betting games. Your way of letting players go all in seems good.
Since we were only playing with a 1 ducat buy-in, it worked alright.
I think it might be better if you're playing with larger pots, and the 3 ducat buy-in, to only allow the "all-in" if a player has only 1 or 2 ducats but wants to play.
The reason we initiated the rule was that we came to a point where someone had had just enough to buy another card [it was like their 3rd], but not enough to play.
It seemed strange that buying new cards could prevent you from playing out the hand, so basically our rule was just to allow you to spend the rest of your money on a card [even if you're a bit short] and count that all-in expenditure as a buy-in.
I suppose it could be reasonably argued that a player in that situation shouldn't have bought so many cards that they couldn't pay the next card and/or the buy-in, but the way the game works, there isn't the "any hand can win" randomness of poker.
A five card hand is considerably more likely to beat out a person stuck by lack of ducats at just their two hole cards, so the all-in one-time "free" buy helps them out a bit.
In any event, this was quite a unique Decktet game. It's not quite clean enough to be an actual gambling event. I liked our drinking-inspired face-up bought cards rule.
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P.D. Magnus
United States
Albany
New York
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NateStraight wrote: pmagnus wrote:
We start each player with about 75 ducats.
Wow. Yikes. I had meant to put 12 per player, but this is still an order of magnitude lower.
Small starting totals and player elimination are good ways to give the game a definite end condition. How many hands did it take before you were done?
When we start with 75, we play all evening and stop when people want to go home. The ducats just serve to keep score. No one is eliminated, so it's as if we used infinitely many ducats. Except of course that counting infinitely many ducats to compare score at the end of the evening would be tricky. 
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Lacombe
Louisiana
It was a dark and stormy night.
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pmagnus wrote: NateStraight wrote: pmagnus wrote:
We start each player with about 75 ducats.
Wow. Yikes. I had meant to put 12 per player, but this is still an order of magnitude lower. Small starting totals and player elimination are good ways to give the game a definite end condition. How many hands did it take before you were done?
I think around 9 or 10, which was a pretty decent number, all things considered.
I can see the "infinitely many ducats" game playing much differently, for sure.
I think a definite end-game would help the game as a self-contained game [at least insofar as most folks think of a "game" as something that ends when X occurs, generally taking Y amount of minutes], but I see the appeal of just playing to play.
The bids, antes, blinds, and buy-ins just have to be balanced with themselves for an infinitely-many game to be interesting. With a particular end-game in mind, they'd really need to be balanced with the size of the pot / number of players.
In addition, a limited pot makes the decision less "Will I go Turtle Butt" and more "Can I afford to play this hand?" Hmm.
What we started off with gave us each enough to ante in to 6 hands, but we underestimated how much we'd all spend on buying new cards.
The player who won the first pot had a distinct advantage in flexibility of playing the next couple of hands. Not sure how much per-player would have been best.
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