President Card Game Rules

President is a climbing game about emptying your hand before anyone else does. Whoever manages it first is the president until the next deal, and the player left holding cards is the bum.

Three to eight people can play, and four to six is where it works best. One ordinary deck is enough, and you can leave the jokers in the box.

The ranks carry over. Before the next deal the bum has to hand the president two good cards and gets two bad ones back, so a win pays off twice and the bum has some climbing to do.

One standard deck of 52 cards. The jokers stay in the box unless you use the wild-card rule further down.

At seven or eight players, shuffle a second deck into the first so everybody still gets a hand worth climbing with.

Pen and paper only matter if you want to keep score. Plenty of groups let the titles do the bookkeeping and write nothing down.

Nothing outranks a two here, not even an ace. Below the two sit the ace, king, queen, jack and the rest, all the way down to the three:

1. 2 (highest)
2. Ace
3. King
4. Queen
5. Jack
6. 10
7. 9
8. 8
9. 7
10. 6
11. 5
12. 4
13. 3 (lowest)

Suits are irrelevant. As far as the rules care, ♠️8 and ♥️8 are the same card, and any two cards of one rank make a pair.

Deal the entire deck out, one card at a time, until every card has an owner. A couple of hands end up one card larger and that changes nothing.

It pays to line the hand up by rank with matching cards together, so your pairs and triples are easy to spot in the middle of a trick.

The player holding ♣3 opens the first deal. Without that convention, the player to the dealer's left opens instead. From the second deal on, the bum shuffles, deals and opens.

The opening player puts down a single card, or several cards of the same rank. Two queens, three fives and four aces are all legal openings.

Play then moves to the left. On your turn you either put down the same number of cards at a higher rank, or you pass:

1. A single jack can be answered with a queen, a king, an ace or a two
2. Two sixes need two higher cards, two nines for instance. A single card is not enough, and three cards are not allowed
3. Sitting on three kings, you may put down two of them and hold the third back

Passing is always legal, even with a winning card in your hand, and it only costs you that one turn. When play comes round again you are free to join back in.

The trick ends once everybody else has passed. Those cards go face down to the side and take no further part in the deal. The player who went last and highest opens the next trick with whatever they like, and if they have run out of cards, the opening moves to the left.

An example: two fives go down, the next player answers with two eights, the third passes and the fourth lands two kings. No pair beats kings, everybody passes, and the player who put the kings down opens again.

Once your last card hits the table you are out of the deal and safe. The others carry on without you.

You may go out in the middle of a trick or on a play nobody beats. If your last cards win the trick, the player to your left opens the next one.

The deal is over when a single player still holds cards. That player is the bum, whether one card is left or nine.

Titles come from the order people finish in:

• President: out of cards first
• Vice president: second out
• Neutral, also called citizen: everyone in the middle
• Vice bum: second to last
• Bum: left holding cards

A three-player game has room for president, neutral and bum only. From four players up, the two vice roles come in. The names shift from table to table, and scum, beggar, peasant and worker are all in use for the bottom rank. Norwegian tables call it the boms, which is where the game's other name comes from.

With the new hands dealt, the top and the bottom of the table settle up:

• The bum gives the president their two best cards and receives two cards of the president's choosing
• The vice bum and the vice president trade one card each, in games of four or more

What the president sends back is up to the president, and it is nearly always the two weakest cards in hand. Some groups let the president ask for named cards instead, both black twos for example, and the bum has to give them up if they are there.

Nobody in the middle exchanges anything. Once the trade is settled, the bum opens.

Nothing in the rules brings the game to a close, so it runs deal after deal until you decide to stop. Settle on a number before you start.

If you want a winner, keep score. Two points to the president and one to the vice president after every deal, and the first player to eleven points takes the game.

The simpler method is a tally of presidencies. Whoever has collected the most when you stop has won.

These rules follow the version played in Norway and across much of Europe. The deck is 52 cards with no jokers, twos are the highest cards, the titles run from president down to bum, and two cards change hands before every new deal. Bombs, wild cards and revolution are here as variants, and a pass costs you nothing but the turn.