Dmytro Polovynka

Deer Hunt

Deer Hunt (鹿狩り) is a trick taking game from Japanese sources.

This game is more like the American Texas 42 game than the Chinese Tien Gow, even though it is played with Chinese Dominoes. The goal of the game is to collect as many red pips (“deers”) as possible by taking tricks. Let me remind you that all fours and ones are red pips, but doubles [6:6] have six red pips too. In total there are 64 red pips in the deck.

“Deer Hunt” is played in pairs, which is unusual for Chinese Dominoes.

The seniority of the tiles has nothing to do with the symbolism of the GuPai. The strongest tile is [6:6], followed by [6:5], [6:4], [6:3], [6:2], [6:1], [5:5], [5:4] and so on down to [1:1].

Each player is dealt 8 tiles.

The game is played as a usual trick taking game. The first player places a tile and each subsequent player places his tile. After four tiles are put, whoever placed the highest tile takes all four tiles for himself. If two identical tiles compete for a trick, the player who placed the tile first wins. Whoever took the trick leads to the next one.

After all eight tricks have been played, players count the number of red pips taken. The pair with fewer red pips pays the difference to their opponents.

The player right to the previous dealer, becomes a dealer for the next game and leads to the first trick. Usually four or eight deals are played.

Variants

A fair deal

In order to equalize the players pairs, both doubles [6:6] are taken from the deck during the deal. The remaining 30 tiles are shuffled and are divided into two piles of 15 each. A double [6:6] is then added to both piles. Both piles are separately shuffled. One pair takes tiles from one pile, and another from the other. Thus, each pair receives a double [6:6]. Sometimes the same manipulations are done with tiles [6:5], [6:4] and [4:4] - to make sure that all four tiles are present in both pairs.

This is the only option that is mentioned on all resources. The following variants are mentioned in only one place.

The deer escaped

If all the tiles in the trick have red spots, then this trick does not go to anyone - “the deer escaped”.

Tien Gow style

The seniority of the tiles is calculated according to the principle of Tien Gow and one can lead not only with one tile, but also with combinations. Then the game becomes technically similar to Tien Gow, with the difference that it is played in pairs and the calculation of points is different.

Texas 42 stye

Use the same principle as in “Texas 42”. Each tile laid out has a suit and a rank. The larger half of the first tile in a trick determines the suit of the trick, the second half is the rank. In order to take a trick, you should follow the suit and put a higher rank. Otherwise, following the suit is optional. For example, if a player lead to the trick with [5:4], then 5 is the suit and 4 is the rank. In order to take a trick, you need to beat it with either [5:5] or [6:5] ([6:5] in this case is considered as a tile of suit 5, since it is not the first tile in the trick).

In this variant, the first tile played determines the trump suit, and from now on all tiles with this number are considered to belong to the trump suit. That is, if the trump suit is 2 (for example, the first tile in the draw was [2:1] or [2:2]), then if the first tile to be placed in the trick is the [5:2] tile, it will be considered that it is a trump suit tile with rank 5.

Sources:

Special thanks to Pavel Oleinik for sharing these rules with me.

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