Playing card scholar David Parlett, the author of The Oxford History of Card Games and The Penguin Book of Card Games, has traced euchre’s origins back to a game called Juckerspiel, which was played by immigrants from the Alsace region, a sliver of territory along France’s eastern border with Germany. Historians haven’t pinpointed the exact moment of euchre’s American arrival, but the earliest reference to the game in the United States is in actor Joe Cowell’s memoir, Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America, where he writes of learning the “mysteries of uker” on a Mississippi river cruise in 1829. Each time a card is played, players try to top it and win the “trick.” The first team to collect three tricks wins the round and scores the first team to score ten points wins.Įuchre began as a variation of an older card game carried over by German immigrants as they traveled across the United States in the nineteenth century. Before any cards are played, players must decide which suit should be trump, the most powerful in the game.
Four players split into two teams, with the average game taking less than a half hour to play and requiring just twenty-four cards - a skinny deck of nines, tens, jacks, queens, kings and aces. If poker, where every bet is an attempt to bankrupt the other players, promotes cut-throat enterprise, then euchre, where every calculation is made with your partner’s support in mind, embodies small-town communalism. You can play euchre on any surface, but I learned that trumpet cases work best.
By the time I joined the junior high band, I had mastered the game, so I played cards with the rest of the outcasts.
#FREE EUCHRE GAMES WITH REAL PEOPLE HOW TO#
In 1862, Library of Congress law librarian Charles Wharton Meehan described the game in his book, The Law and Practice of the Games of Euchre: “No sedentary game is more popular, or so generally played for amusement in domestic circles, throughout the wide spread ‘eminent demesne’ of the United States, as euchre - the Queen of all card-games.” These days, most Americans don’t even recognize the word “euchre,” but it has been kept alive by loyal bands of Midwestern card players who live in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, a geographical body dubbed the “Euchre Belt.” Growing up in Michigan, I was a scrawny flute-playing pre-teen with pink plastic glasses I learned how to make friends while playing euchre. When they were rescued months later, the makeshift card game was memorialized in a survivor’s diary, a rescuer’s memoir and a Congressional report about the disaster.Īt the time, euchre was one of the most popular games in the United States. During the ordeal, a German immigrant taught the survivors how to play a game with homemade cards called euchre. They lived on a five-mile sheet of ice for months, building huts out of ice and snow, and hunting seals for food. Lost during the infamous Polaris expedition, this miserable band included sailors, explorers, and a newborn baby. In the fall of 1872, nineteen travelers were marooned in the Arctic Ocean.