The History of Five-Card Yak

Genesis

Five-Card Yak was first devised one night in the fall of 1990 in Charlottesville, Virginia. At the time, I was an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia, who was living with several other students in a three-bedroom apartment in town. It was a cold, dark evening in November—I believe it was either a Tuesday or Wednesday night—and my roommate's girlfriend, Tiffany, had dropped by for a visit. Since it was a weeknight, she and I were diligently working on assignments for class. Her boyfriend Mike and our roommate Tom, on the other hand, had decided to spend the evening drinking beer.

It wasn't too long before Mike and Tom began to feel the effects of their chosen form of entertainment for the night. They began to become restless and bored. Therefore, partially to amuse myself and partially to get them out of my hair so that I could work, I had them play a drinking-game version of “High or Low,” the rules of which I made up on the spot. This kept them pleasantly occupied for a while.

Eventually, however, our other roommate, J.P., returned home from an early evening out, and he had brought his date with him. Since he intended to make dinner for her, Mike, Tom, Tiffany, and I politely retired to the bedroom that I shared with Mike in the back of the apartment. At this point, Mike and Tom began to grow tired of the simple game that I had invented on the fly, and so, realizing that the changing circumstances meant that I would not get any more useful work done that night, I gave up on schoolwork and joined Mike and Tom in their sordid bacchanalianism.

Since I was still sober for the moment, I set my mind to the task of devising a better game to play. That fall, I had occasionally played Hearts with a couple of friends in the early evening to pass the time while we waited for other friends to join us. It occurred to me that the basic ideas behind Hearts could make for a very good drinking game. Usually, in a drinking game, the player has two goals. The first is to avoid drinking, so as to be able to continue to play as long as possible (and avoid vomiting); the other is to try to make the other players drink (perhaps to induce vomiting). In Hearts, taking a heart-suited card carries a penalty, and it's not difficult to see how this translates into penalties consisting of drinks taken by the player.

A Game is Born

Had I left it at that, I could have invented “Hearts, the Drinking Game” that night. I realized at the time, however, that simply trying to avoid drinking by avoiding taking hearts would not be such an exciting game. I needed a twist on this theme. It was then that I hit on the idea of a progressive penalty to make the game more interesting. That is, the penalty, quantified as the number of drinks to be taken, increases as the game goes on, and so the player has an incentive to try to take drinks early in the hand so as to avoid taking drinks later when the penalties are more severe.

This idea really appealed to me. There's something delightfully perverse about a situation that causes the player to act willingly in such a way that will likely cause him to drink in order to avoid having to drink even more. Very few drinking games have this incentive. Sacrifice is the very soul of Five-Card Yak and has been since the very beginning.

With the basic philosophy established, I quickly began to flesh out the details. Obviously, a game with 13 penalty cards and 13 tricks, like Hearts, was not going to work. There's a limit to how high the progressive penalty can go, and 13 is too high. Therefore, I replaced the penalty from taking a specific kind of card with a penalty for taking tricks in general. Next, I reduced the number of tricks and the number of cards in each player's hand to five, a number obviously inspired by Poker, and so the five-card drinking game was born. Tom, who was a fellow of generous wit, quickly thought up a name for it that night, mostly as a joke, and the game has been known as "Five-Card Yak" ever since.

An important emphasis early on in formulating the rules of the new game was to keep it as simple as possible. At the time, this was mostly a result of practical considerations. I faced the challenge of teaching these rules to my two intoxicated roommates, and I also hoped to be able to remember the rules of the game in the morning. In the end, this turned out to be a good decision. A drinking game should have rules that are simple enough to learn and remember easily, even as playing the game produces a progressive dulling of the mind.

Thus, I had the dealer lead the first card, and the winner of each trick lead the next, becoming the next dealer at the end of the hand. In this way, nobody was required to remember who was the last dealer. The simple and easy-to-remember rule is that the winner always goes first.

Another simplification involved determining the winner of the trick. Although I felt it was necessary to keep the requirement of following the suit of the first card played—so as to force out high or low cards that otherwise would be saved for later—I made the suit irrelevant for determining the winner of the trick. This decision not only simplified the rules, but had important implications for game play. An important strategy in Hearts is to take advantage of being short-suited—that is, having very few cards of a particular suit. By eliminating all of the cards of a suit, it then becomes possible to dump troublesome cards whenever that suit is led. With only five cards in the hand, however, being short suited is guaranteed from the beginning, and requiring the winner to be the highest card of the suit led would have meant that, too often, the winner of one trick becomes the winner of the remaining tricks, because he is the only one who is playing the winning suit.

Five-Card Yak borrowed other ideas from Hearts—for example, passing cards after the deal. This, in my opinion, is one of the best features of the game. It provides two improvements to game play. First, it allows the player to get rid of bad cards before the hand begins. It also provides some intelligence of another player's motives, which is particularly useful in the variants of Hearts in which a player is allowed to “shoot the moon,” that is, capture all of the hearts to win the hand. Passing low cards usually means that one's neighbor is about to “go for it.”

Unfortunately, however, the usual rules for passing cards in Hearts are far too complicated for a drinking game. In some variants, three cards are passed first to the left, then across the table, then to the right, and finally no cards are passed. I was trying to create a game for players who might be so drunk that they can't distinguish left from right, much less remember where the cards were passed the last time, so another simplification was required. The solution was easy: pass one card each way, one to the left and one to the right. This has the additional benefit of allowing the player to choose which adversary will receive the really bad card, something that becomes even more important as new rules are created during play (see below).

I borrowed other features from Hearts, such as “shooting the moon.” The reason for this should be obvious. A drinking game in which everyone tries as hard as they can to avoid drinking is boring. The real fun comes from making someone else drink. Therefore, it was only natural that I added such an incentive to the game. Once again, however, a borrowed idea needed some changes before being adopted. In Hearts, “shooting the moon” requires taking every card in the suit of hearts. The natural analogue for Five-Card Yak is taking all five tricks of the hand, but on that November evening, it didn't require much time playing the new game with Mike and Tom for me to realize that taking all five tricks in a hand is a prohibitively formidable task. So the number of tricks was reduced to four.

Rules, Rules, and More Rules

The other game that I borrowed ideas from is a drinking game called Mexican, which my friends and I had been playing that fall. The core premise of the game is fun in and of itself. It's basically a variant of Liar's Dice, with the loser of the showdown forced to drink. What really makes the game memorable, however, is that when a particular combination of the dice is rolled the player gets to add a new rule to the game. So what begins as a straightforward competition of trying to out bluff one's neighbor eventually becomes trying to out bluff one's neighbor while remembering to adhere to a list of additional silly rules invented by the players. The result can be very fun and sometimes hilarious, depending on the creativity of the players.

I needed an enticing reward to encourage players to shoot for taking four tricks. Making some or all of the other players drink is an obvious choice for a drinking game, but I added the additional bonus of allowing the successful player to change the game itself by adding a rule, or two if the player is lucky enough to take all five tricks. Being a dice game, new rules in Mexican usually involve things that are not directly related to the game play itself—like not being able to say people's first names or not being able to use pronouns. I expected these types of rules would be added by players to Five-Card Yak as well, but Yak offers more interesting possibilities: there are 52 cards (or 54 if the jokers are added) that can be used to trigger rules.

The “face card” rule was one of the first rules involving cards to be invented the night that my roommates and I tried out the new game. This added rule states that playing a face card allows the person playing the card to force another player to take a drink. In creating this rule, I tried to borrow from the perverse dilemma of conflicting interests that is the main theme of Five-Card Yak. Since taking tricks is bad (unless one intends to “shoot the moon”), the face cards usually are the worst cards in a hand and are normally passed to a neighbor immediately after the deal. With the introduction of this new rule, however, face cards suddenly have value, and so they are less likely to be passed off—especially since the neighbor receiving the card can later return the favor by using it to make the one who passed it drink.

By the end of the evening, we had a game that was playable and fun. Thinking back on that night, it's amazing to me that we managed to remember the rules in the morning, but then again, I had designed the game from the beginning to be easy to learn and remember. For the rest of that academic year, I continued to play Yak with my roommates. Some of our games back then are the stuff of legend and resulted in many of our traditional rules that we usually add to the game when we get the chance.

A perfect example is the “crazy eights” rule. I cannot remember who was the inspired player that originally proposed this rule—other than I'm sure that it was not me—but it quickly became one of our favorites. I recall one time in the spring of that school year, when J.P. had invited a friend from Cornell to visit for the weekend, four of us ended up playing Yak one morning. I was sitting across from my roommate Mike; J.P. sat directly across from his friend. Eventually, someone added the “crazy eights” rule to the game, which stipulates that when an eight is played, the person sitting across from the person playing the card has to drink, stand up, spin around twice, and drink again. By some strange twist of luck, I was dealt an eight every hand for about a dozen hands in a row. Each time, I passed the eight to the left, to the friend of my roommate J.P., which meant that J.P.'s friend was forced to make him drink before the end of each hand.

Old School

The rules that we used in those days were slightly different than the official rules of the game today. The original rules were slightly more complicated and substantially more severe. The largest difference is that there was no “one drink to make up the difference” rule—that is, all of the penalty drinks were taken for every trick, regardless of whether the player had taken the previous trick. Thus, if a player took the first, second, and third tricks of the hand, this player would have had to drink 1 + 2 + 3 = 6 times. This created a problem with the “shoot the moon” rule, since in order to make all of the other players drink five times, a player would have to take between six and nine penalty drinks, depending on which tricks were taken, which defeats much of the purpose of the rule.

This problem was realized early, and so to overcome it, I added a complicated, ad hoc rule to the game. The original rules stated that a player has to drink immediately for the first and second trick taken during a hand, but when a third trick is taken, the player should wait to take the penalty drinks. If this player takes another trick before the hand is complete, then he or she will have taken at least four tricks, enough to qualify for “shooting the moon.” Thus, the penalty drinks for the third trick are waived. If, on the other hand, the player fails to take another trick before the end of the hand, the penalty drinks for the third drink must be taken before the next deal.

This rule was a disaster. Not only was it the most difficult rule to explain to new players, it was also the most difficult rule for experienced players to remember. It required that something, namely the penalty for the third or fourth trick, must be remembered between plays, which runs counter to Five-Card Yak's philosophy of keeping the rules as simple as possible.

The other major difference between the rules then and the rules now is that, originally, tied cards didn't cancel. Instead, if two or more cards tied for the highest card, all of the players who played the card had to take the penalty drinks, but only the player who played the card first received credit for taking the trick that could be applied for making a new rule.

Yak on the Information Superhighway

With the popularization of the Internet and the advent of the World Wide Web in the mid-nineties, Five-Card Yak was published online. It made its first appearance on the Internet in 1996 as a web page that was part of my account on the University of Virginia's computer system. This was the first time that the rules of the game had been put down in writing—before this, they had been conveyed only by word of mouth—and much of the official rules today are still exactly the same as they were at that time. The graphic of the five cards, including the projectile-vomiting Jack of Spades, also first appeared on that original web page.

Because the rules were published on a UVa web site, with the “.virginia.edu” domain, I was a bit worried at the time that the university might object to having a drinking game associated, even loosely, with the school's online presence. In the early days of the Web, it was difficult to know just how sensitive organizations would be about their online image. Therefore, I included a short disclaimer at the bottom of the page to put some distance between my content and the university. It read,

“Disclaimer: The University of Virginia does not necessarily condone the consumption of large quantities of alcohol.”

“GOVERNMENT WARNING: According to the surgeon general, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems.”

Five for Two

As I mentioned above, the rules for Five-Card Yak were somewhat different in the early days. The rules for players trying to “shoot the moon” and the rules to resolve tied cards were more complicated. These rules were eventually changed, which I think generally improved the flow of the game.

From the very beginning, Five-Card Yak was intended to be played by at least three people. By the mid-nineties, however, I began to think seriously about how the game could be played by only two people. This was largely motivated by personal considerations. I was a bachelor sharing an apartment with an old friend from college, and while we were enthusiastic about striking up a spontaneous game of Five-Card Yak every now and then, we often had difficulty finding a third person to make the game playable.

Therefore, I experimented with various two-player versions of the game. I no longer remember the details of many of these attempts. I only recall that they were far too complicated to make for an enjoyable game. Nevertheless, for years there existed some form of two-player Yak that almost never was played.

Finally, in 2002, I developed a version that I was satisfied with. The concept was to have each player control two hands, an idea that I had been experimenting with for years. Finally, I had refined it into a playable game. The key breakthrough resulted from the selection of the initial hands, the order of play, and the additional rule about how cards must be played. I borrowed from Bridge the idea of the “dummy” hand. Each extra hand has its cards displayed face up, which has important implications for the strategy of the game. Each of the two dummy hands is controlled by a player, but there is an additional restriction. By this time, the rule involving ties had been changed, so that ties cancel and are ineligible to win the trick. Therefore, I forced the dummy hands to avoid taking tricks if possible—that is, if a card from the dummy hand can tie one that has already been played, it must be played. This rule keeps players from abusing their dummy hands by forcing their dummy hands to make sacrifices to keep their controlling players from taking drinks. Since the dummy hands are visible and their play is more predictable, this rule greatly improves the ability of skill to affect the game.

This version of the game was play-tested and perfected in the summer of 2002 while on a trip to Cancun with my girlfriend at the time. I still think that it is the best version of the game when it comes to opportunities for skillful play.

For many years, this version was featured on the game's web site as the only two-player version of Five-Card Yak. It appeared along with an obsolete variant of the game for six or more players in which the players were paired in teams of two. The players on each team would sit across the table from each other and try to coordinate their play, much like in Bridge, with both players on the team sharing the rewards or penalties of the trick.

Eventually, however, I realized that the changes in the rules over the years had made the game more playable by very small or very large groups. For example, I originally felt the need to develop a two-player game because, under the old rules, each five-card hand results in the players taking 15 drinks. With only two players, each player would take, on average, seven and a half drinks, leading to a very short game indeed.

Two rules that had been introduced into the game over the years changed all of this. The “make-it-up” rule changed the penalty for taking multiple tricks in a row from having to drink the entire number of drinks for all of the tricks to drinking only once for each trick taken after the first. Since it is far more common for a player to take a series of consecutive tricks in a two-player game—whether intentionally or not—this change in the rules greatly reduced the number of drinks that are likely to be taken in one hand. In order for the two players to imbibe 15 drinks in one hand, which was the old standard, they would have to alternate winning all five tricks, which is unlikely.

The other rule change that greatly affected the two-player game was forbidding tied cards from winning the trick. Since playing the same card as one's opponent guarantees that the player cannot drink for the trick, a player employing a defensive strategy (i.e., trying not to drink) will try to match his or her opponent's card. When there are only two players and they both play the same card, then nobody drinks. This reduces the total drink count of the game.

Two's Company, Six is a Crowd

Now that I had convinced myself that the number of drinks taken by the players had been sufficiently reduced to make normal two-player Yak a playable game, I had to deal with just one more problem. With only one other competitor to challenge the attempt, it had become too easy to “shoot the moon” by taking four of the five tricks. The solution was simple—just raise the bar to taking all five tricks.

With this in mind, I also reexamined how to handle the situation when there are more than the optimal number of players in the game. Until then, I had recommended that, in games with more than five players, the players should pair up in teams. The main reason for this suggestion was that it appeared to be too difficult for one player to take four out of five tricks with so many other players in the game. Now I thought, if I could raise the bar for only two players, why couldn't I lower the bar for six or more players?

To test this idea, I put my scientific training to work and wrote a short computer program to simulate a simple model of the game. Based on the results of the simulations that I performed, I concluded that the chance for a player to introduce a new rule was good enough to make a playable game. Thus, I replaced the “team” rules with a three-trick “shoot the moon” variant for six or more players.

The rules still remain vague on this point, and that was deliberate. If you have a group of six or more who want to play Five-Card Yak, you have two options: either break up into smaller groups for a more intimate game, or play with the entire group using the looser criteria for making a new rule. Both options have their pros and cons. The former is closer to the real feel of Yak; the latter is more of a party game.

Five-Card Yak Today

Eventually, in 2010, I moved the rules of Five-Card Yak to a new website with its own domain name, and that's where they've been ever since. It was at this time that I drafted the streamlined, bullet-list rules that appear on the main page. When I first wrote the official rules in 1996, my purpose was to be comprehensive. In launching a new website, I realized that a brief, concise, point-by-point summary would be the most useful format for introducing new players to the game.

This was also the time that I devised ways to play this drinking game without drinking. One of the best features of Five-Card Yak is that, unlike most drinking games, the fun comes from strategic play and making up new rules. When you think about it, it seems that drinking is merely a way to keep score. Well, pennies could do this job just as well, couldn't they?

Therefore, I proposed, not one, but two ways to play Five-Card Yak without alcohol. The first way was more cutthroat, with players being eliminated as a result of bad play. The other variant was more socially oriented. Everybody remains in the game until the pennies (or buttons or whatever tokens are being used) run out. Fortunately, Five-Card Yak is flexible enough to provide a good game with either variant.

So that is where Five-Card Yak is today. It has come a long way since that cold November evening in 1990. I'd like to think that it has improved along the way while retaining its original charm. Most importantly, however, I hope that it can be enjoyed today as much as I have enjoyed it over the years.

Cheers!