Card Games

I played an "informal" card game called "donkey" after nearly 30 years today, and struggled to figure out heuristics of the game, given my experience with Bridge

Back in 2021, at the height of the second wave of the pandemic, and when I was just about starting to settle into my job at Delhivery, I decided I should do a podcast. This was one excuse I’d have to talk to people outside my company - my role at Delhivery being entirely internal-facing.

I called the podcast “Data Chatter” (brownie points for anyone who figures the funda of the name), and recorded thirteen sixteen episodes (rather, recorded fourteen seventeen and released thirteen sixteen - the audio quality of the fourteenth was too bad to put out).

Each episode was around a different topic around analytics and data science, and while I had fun recording the episodes, the editing process was too laborious, and one “season” in, I put NED and shut it. I might revive it sometime soon, though, for my company.

In any case, one of the episodes was with my friend and montessori educator Rahul (RG), who spoke about how to introduce data science to children.

It is an insightful episode, and I encourage you to listen to it if you haven’t already, and you have young kids. In his school, RG introduces probability to children as young as 6 or 7, by way of making them play games (including card games). “You start with blackjack”, he had told me, “and by the time they are eight or nine, poker is a must”.

My daughter was nearly five when I recorded this episode, and I immediately procured a pack of cards and taught her blackjack. She took to it enthusiastically (she would sit behind me while I was working and play with her Gruffalo toy as the “dealer”). Soon I taught her “baby Rummy” (4 cards each, you keep picking either the last discarded card or from the top of a stack, until all your cards are of the same suit). She liked that as well.

Then sometime (I forget when) I started getting greedy and introduced a “baby version” of poker to her - and I had tugged too hard. She found it too complex and lost interest in cards.

And though my children go to a school that is similar to the one that RG runs (in fact, he had recommended the school to us in 2019), their school doesn’t do card games. At least, they don’t do the “probability level card games” (I’m told they play “Go Fish!” in their environment, though).

Both my daughter and I are NED Fellows (remember that she is Mini Me, and she retains the title even though she has a brother now), and so we had put NED for cards. Yesterday, on the way to school, we ended up talking about sorting algorithms, and I said I’ll “teach her sorting” and made her pull out her pack of cards after her brother had gone to bed yesterday.

Aside: I shuffled all the hearts in a deck and asked her to sort them. She intuitively used Selection Sort (I’d’ve intuitively used Insertion Sort).

Anyway, this evening, after my son had gone to bed, I found my daughter alone in her room, playing “baby rummy” with herself. I decided it is a good time to introduce “donkey” to her (and mildly panicked when I realised I had been younger than she is now, when my father had introduced proper rummy to me. So it’s time to get her into proper rummy as well).

I’m unable to find online links to a game that resembles what we win our family called “Donkey”. It was this strange game that worked in large family gatherings, and which incredibly didn’t need proper packs of cards (inevitably, people would have card decks with missing cards).

Each player gets an equal number of cards. It is a trick-based game. Everyone has to follow the suit of the leader of the trick. Whoever plays the highest card in the trick leads the next trick. If you don’t have the suit, you ruff (trump) with any other card of your choice. And whoever has led the highest card of the original suit of that round has to pick up all the cards played in that round.

So you soon have players with hands of massively differing sizes. The objective is to empty your hand.

If someone knows what this game is “formally” called, please let me know, with links.

My daughter took to the game enthusiastically, and soon I figured that she was figuring out the logic. At the end of our second hand, when she saw that I had only one card in my hand, she said aloud “I know you have a heart, but I don’t have one, so I’ll play something random and you win”. And in the next hand, she promptly ruffed me with a 2 of hearts, while holding on to a 10 of hearts (since this is a “emptying your hand” game, you should get rid of higher cards first), which caused her to lose the game (I led back the 2H, which she had to cover with 10H, and after that we had disjoint suits, and so she, as the leader, lost).

Donkey is a bit of an informal game. There is no rule on the number of cards dealt to each player at the beginning of the game. The full deck doesn’t need to be used. You don’t even need to have a full deck to play the game. You can sometimes play with multiple decks (when in large groups).

I had largely played this game in family gatherings in the late 80s, and through the 90s. Once I went to college, I’d completely stopped playing “donkey”, but had picked up Bridge, which is a much more formal trick-taking game. Bridge being formal meant that there is maths (Bayes’ Theorem, to be specific) involved, and so you develop heuristics based on that.

With “donkey” being inexact, through our play today, I kept struggling to figure out a right strategy. What do I lead when? How do I deal with long suits? Should I get rid of my singletons asap? What suit do I use to ruff? Etc. Etc.

I hope that my daughter retains interest in this game and we play it often. If that were to happen, then I’ll possibly figure out the heuristics of this game. Until then, I’ll just be applying some modification of my Bridge heuristics to this, and keep losing to my 8-year-old who has just learnt the game!

PS: A few years ago, a friend who is a heavy gamer, and whose daughter (a few years older than mine) is also a gamer, had cautioned me against introducing card games such as poker and bridge too early - citing the gambling risk. I’d possibly put NED in cards after that.