Ghost Card Game Rules

Ghost is a two player game about ending up with as few points as possible. Your cards lie face down on the table in front of you, you get a look at only two of them before play starts, and the rest you have to remember or guess at as the round goes along.

One card is put aside as your ghost. You never look at it, you never get to swap it, and it counts against you all the same. A round played without a single mistake can still be lost because the ghost turned out to be a king.

The game comes from Norway, where it is called Spøkelse, and no rule book has ever published it. What survives are the ways people play it at home, and they differ. These rules follow the best documented of them: two players, five cards each, one ghost. The rest are listed further down.

A round runs under ten minutes. Playing on until somebody reaches 21 points usually takes 15 to 30.

• One standard deck of 52 cards, jokers removed
• 2 players
• Paper and a pen if you play more than one round

All the table has to hold is a row of four cards in front of each player and the stock between you, so a small surface is plenty.

Nothing in Ghost depends on the suit, only on the rank, and the low ranks are the ones you want:

An eight is the best card you can be sitting on and a jack costs next to nothing, while a king is the most expensive card in the pack. End the round holding ♠️8 ♥️J ♦️A ♣️2 and there are 3.5 points on the table.

Some players count the jack as 11, in line with the queen and the king. That turns it into a card you want rid of instead of one worth keeping, so settle the question before the first deal.

Draw a card each to see who deals. Low card deals.

The dealer gives five cards to each player, one at a time, face down. Nobody looks at anything yet. Then both players do the same three things:

1. Push one of the five cards a little to one side. That is your ghost, and it stays untouched for the whole round.
2. Lay the other four out in a row in front of you, still face down.
3. Lift two of those four and look at them, whichever two you like. Put them back on the same places without showing them.

The rest of the deck goes face down between you as the stock, and its top card is turned face up beside it. That face up card is the start of the discard pile, which grows all round.

So you know two of your own four cards, have no idea about the other two, and know nothing whatsoever about the ghost. Whoever did not deal starts.

Turns alternate, and each one goes like this:

1. Take the top card of the stock, or take the face up card from the discard pile.
2. If you do not want it, lay it face up on the discard pile and your turn is done.
3. If you do want it, pick one of your four places and swap. The new card goes face down on that place, and the card that was there goes face up on the discard pile.

You choose a place, not a card. What you are giving up stays hidden until you have lifted it, and the swap stands once you have. When you already know a place, you obviously know what you are giving up, and that is the whole value of the two cards you looked at during setup.

The ghost sits outside all of this. It cannot be swapped, moved or looked at.

Whatever you throw away lands face up, which makes it an offer to your opponent. Discard ♠️K and nobody is going to touch it. Discard ♦️8 and it may well go straight into the row across the table.

An example: you draw ♥️3 from the stock. Place two holds ♣️Q, which you saw during setup, so that is where the three goes. The queen leaves for the discard pile, twelve points with it, and you still know exactly what is sitting on place two.

Once the stock is empty, the round is over.

Both players turn their four cards over and add them up, and the ghost is turned last. The lower total wins the round.

An example: your row is ♠️8 ♦️A ♣️2 ♥️3, six points in all, which wins most rounds. Then over goes the ghost: ♠️K. Your total is 19, and your opponent takes the round with 12.

For a longer game, write the totals down and keep adding them up. The first player to reach 21 points has lost. Winning the cheap rounds is not enough on its own, since one expensive round can settle the whole thing.

These rules describe Ghost for two players: 52 cards without jokers, five cards each, one of them set aside as the ghost, two cards you are allowed to see, and a round that lasts until the stock is empty. The jack counts half a point here, as it does in the oldest Norwegian description of the game, with the queen at 12 and the king at 13. The game has no official rules at all, and the common departures from these are listed under variants.