#29. Japanese Napoleon (Friday, November 26, 2010)

#29. Japanese Napoleon (Friday, November 26, 2010)

What was your best day…of being pleasantly surprised by how fun something was?

First things first, let me just lay out the rules of this glorious, glorious card game (that I must have explained verbally to at least ten different social groups during my lifetime).

Because the greatest part of Japanese Napoleon is just how unnecessarily complicated, but also strangely intuitive, the rules are.

Five-player game. Use the full 52-card deck plus one Joker (you could play with four players with a smaller deck, but the rules are essentially the same).

Each game has two parts. First, the players are dealt ten cards each (three are left face-down in the middle), and then the players start “bidding” on the number of points that they and their partner will need to get (to be explained in a second). Each bid also comes with a choice of suit. Minimum bid is 13.1

The winner of the bid becomes “Napoleon”; their chosen suit becomes the Trump suit. Napoleon then names a card. Whoever has that card becomes his “partner”2. Napoleon then picks up the three face-down cards and exchanges them with three cards his current hand, to get a slightly better hand3.

Then the players start doing tricks, like in Hearts or Spades (i.e. the lead, who’s initially Napoleon, leads off with a card, and everyone has to follow suit if they can; the “winner” of the trick takes all the cards and leads the next trick). Each trick’s winner is determined by the following hierarchy4:

  1. Joker if it is the card being led off (in which case the lead chooses the suit to follow it)5
  2. Ace of Spades (but if someone plays Queen of Hearts in the same trick, that person wins) (I don’t know, there’s some kind of Japanese backstory about the ruler’s wife being stronger than the ruler)
  3. Jack of the Trump Suit
  4. Jack of the same color as Trump (i.e. if Trump is Hearts, then this is the Jack of Diamonds)6
  5. Ace of Clubs (but if someone plays Queen of Diamonds in the same trick, that person wins)7
  6. Two, if all players play a card of the same suit, but not on the first turn8
  7. King  of Diamonds (president)9
  8. Highest card of the Trump suit
  9. Highest card of the lead suit

Players collect “points” by winning tricks with 10, J, Q, K, A; so there’s 20 points in total. Then, at the end of the round, the Napoleon and his partner (who everybody knows by now) total up their points. And if they get at least as many points as the number they bid, then they win (+2 for Napoleon, +1 for his partner, -1 for others). Otherwise, they lose (-2 for Napoleon, -1 for his partner, +1 for others).

The players play 10 games, and whoever has the most points at the end is the winner.

That Friday night started with a group dinner in downtown Kitchener with me, my best friend Masato, Masato’s sister10, Masato’s Bengali girlfriend Roshani, Masato’s other housemate Jensen, and Masato’s enigmatic friend Cranford11. It’s a nice restaurant with a catfish special, and this was actually the first dinner in a big group I had during my entire time at Waterloo…and this was as a third-year (#31). So that in itself was an amazing experience…though I suppose superseded by what came next.

After dinner, we all go back to Masato’s house. And he shows us the game. And despite me going through the first thirty minutes not knowing what the hell is going on and not wanting to play, it gets fun. Really, really, really fun.

And from that point on until the end of undergrad, we play at least two rounds of this game at every social gathering – roping in and eventually hooking every new friend we come across.

Go ahead and try Japanese Napoleon with your friends. I won’t blame you if you don’t get to the next entry until much, much later.

  1. The hierarchy between suit choice is Clubs->Diamonds->Hearts->Spades.
  2. That’s the coolest part. Only the “partner” knows he’s the “partner”.
  3. If the named card is in that pile, then Napoleon is “going alone”, i.e. screwed.
  4. Which, every time we play, is crudely drawn on a piece of paper that must stay in the middle of the table, for ongoing reference, at all times.
  5. If Joker is not being led off, it’s automatically the weakest.
  6. This part of the rules also gets me in how subtly fun-inducing it is.
  7. I just don’t know.
  8. Also deceptively fun.
  9. I really don’t know.
  10. Visiting from Belleville, where she was a high school exchange student.
  11. This Hong Kong guy who was literally always sullen and acting depressed; and prone to rage-quitting (typically by starting the bidding stage off at 20) if he was losing.