Elly and I have just played Cripple Mr Onion* It’s fitting she won the first set we played with a 8-suit deck I gave her for her birthday. We played using the basic rules, i.e. not using the modifiers.

There’s some mismatching of the less familiar suits. The deck has Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, Roses, Axes, Tridents and Doves. One paragraph on diskworld.wikia.com pairs these as: Spades and Axes, Clubs and Tridents, Hearts and Roses, Diamonds and Doves. However, the modifiers mention Cups, Coins, Swords and Staves, so before printing the rules, I replaced Cups with Roses, Coins with Roses, Swords with Axes and Staves with Doves. I’m not sure whether this is traditional but it works.

I found it’s a bit fiddly to deal from such a large deck, and slightly fiddly to pick up and place cards to build better scoring groups, while still trying to hold on to the cards I didn’t want to show. But I think this added to the fun – it was a gentle and happy way to pass a Sunday evening with my better half.

*beware noisy ads!

By the way, this post in in the out and about category because the game originates from another universe, and so is ‘out of this world’. You may now groan.