Dmytro Polovynka

Deer Hunt

Deer Hunt (鹿狩り) is a trick-taking game described in Japanese sources.

Although it is played with Chinese dominoes, it is closer in spirit to the American game Texas 42 than to Chinese Tien Gow. The goal is to capture as many red pips (“deer”) as possible by winning tricks.

All 1s and 4s are red pips, and the double [6:6] also contains six red pips. In total, the full set contains 64 red pips.

Unlike most Chinese domino games, Deer Hunt is played in partnerships.

Tile Ranking

The ranking of tiles does not follow traditional GuPai symbolism.

The order from highest to lowest is purely numerical:

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].

Gameplay

Each player is dealt 8 tiles.

The game is played as a standard trick-taking game:

After all eight tricks have been played, players count the red pips they have captured.

The partnership with fewer red pips pays the difference to the opponents.

The player to the right of the previous dealer becomes the next dealer and also leads the first trick. Usually, four or eight deals are played in a session.

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 procedure applies to [6:5], [6:4] and [4:4], ensuring that all four tiles are present in both pairs.

This is the only variant consistently mentioned in all sources. The following variants are reported only in single sources.

The deer escaped

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

Tien Gow style

Tile ranking follows Tien Gow principles, and players may lead not only single tiles but also combinations.

In this version, the mechanics resemble Tien Gow, but the game is still played in partnerships and scoring is based on red pips rather than trick counts.

Texas 42 stye

Use the same principle as in “Texas 42”. Each tile 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 in a round 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 subsequent 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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