Does your family love solitaire, but you want to play together? Or maybe you love a good card game that’s easy to DIY? Either way, you should check out Kings in the Corner!
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Materials Needed
All you really need to play Kings in the Corner is a regulation deck of poker cards (no jokers, though). However, our game came with a handy-dandy tray that made keeping the game organized much easier. It also came with tokens for betting, but you could easily use something like pennies.
Our tray has four tabbed slots and four king positions (hence the name, “Kings in the Corner”). Every player is dealt 7 cards, antes up one token, and one card is placed (from the draw pile) in each tabbed slot.
How to Play Kings in the Corner
Players then take turns playing as many cards as they can. Kings must be played to a corner king slot as soon as is possible. Cards are played much like in solitaire: sequentially down (King down to Ace), and alternating red and black. Suit does not matter.
Cards in the tabbed slots should be played so that only the bottom card is under the tab, and only the top and bottom cards are showing. Players can also move the cards in the tabbed slots, as long as the bottom card can be played on another stack. So if you have a tabbed slot (we’ll call this Stack A) with a black 7 down to a black 3, and you have a red 8 on top of any stack (tabbed or king slot), you can move the entirety of Stack A onto that red 8. This opens up another tabbed slot for you to play another card into.
Penalties and Scorekeeping
If you forget to play a king as soon as possible, add three tokens to the pot. If you can’t play a card, you must add a token to the pot. At the end of your turn, draw one card, but if you forget, you must add a token to the pot.
The first player out of cards wins that hand. All the rest of the players must count the cards remaining in their hands and place that many tokens in the pot. The winner of the hand gets all the tokens in the pot. The first player to 100 tokens wins!
Kings in the Corner is a Win!
Kings in the Corner is excellent for noticing patterns and for developing visual acuity. Like many card games, it’s part luck and part skill, so it works well for many players. It’s also just a card game, so a bit easier to practice sportsmanship with (no cute potatoes like in Potato Pirates!). If you haven’t tried Kings in the Corner yet, grab a deck of cards and give it a whirl!