We played Guàn Dàn yesterday. John McLeod (of Pagat.com) was visiting Tampere recently and recommended this Chinese climbing card game to me. According to him, it’s very popular in China right now. It has a couple of outstanding features among climbing games.
It’s a fixed partnership game like Tichu, and instead of counting points, it’s about going out first and uses a Sheng Ji scoring system based on promotions. Each team starts on level 2 and as they win rounds, they get promoted. Eventually they reach the levels 10, J, Q, K and A, and if they win on level A, they win the game. You don’t need to count points, the main thing that matters is that one of the team members goes out first. When the second team member goes out then affects how many promotion steps the team gets, so that’s important too.
The game is played with a double deck, which is dealt out completely. That means you start the game with a 27-card hand. Yes, that is bonkers. It takes a while to sort your cards, and it’s difficult to take in everything in your hand.
The combinations are small. You can play single cards, pairs, triplets, full hands, five-card straights (but not longer!) or six-card tubes (three consecutive pairs) and plates (two consecutive triplets). The only bigger combinations are bombs, which are at least four cards of the same number, but can be up to ten cards. The other bombs are a five-card straight flush and all four jokers.
One team is always the declarers. Their current score is the level of the hand. The cards that match the level are the highest single cards after the jokers, and the hearts of that number are wild cards, which can be used as any card except the jokers. If we’re on level 7 and declarers, the card rank is red joker, black joker, 7, A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and the 7s of hearts are wild.
If you like bombs in Tichu, here you get to bomb a lot more. You don’t always get a bomb in your hand, but often you have, perhaps more than one, and having a low bomb isn’t all that great. I’m not surprised this game is called “throwing eggs”, where “egg” and “bomb” both sound like “dàn” in Chinese.
This is a longer game. Our game took nine rounds and two hours, so almost 15 minutes per round. It was the first play for everyone and there was a pub quiz going on at the same time, so I assume it’s going be a bit faster in the future. But shuffling, dealing and sorting your hand will always be a bit slow. The game also has rules where you can fall from level A to level 2, which is brutal, and I’m not at all surprised there are variant rules to change that total reset to a smaller fall. The game is already long enough!
I quite liked this. More than Tichu? I’m not sure. Tichu feels like a really lean game compared to Guàn Dàn. The very large hands are clumsy and a little annoying, but on the other hand, navigating that initial 27-card mess is an interesting challenge. I’m looking forward to playing this more.