Cripple Mr Onion

Cripple Mr Onion requires an eight-suit deck of playing cards; we recommend The Fat Pack, which adds Roses, Axes, Tridents and Doves to the traditional suits of Spades, Hearts, Diamonds and Clubs. For the purpose of forming flushes, these are taken to be paired as follows:

	Spades are paired with Axes
	Clubs are paired with Tridents
	Hearts are paired with Roses
	Diamonds are paired with Doves

Otherwise, two regular (four-suit) decks can be used adequately for most purposes; see the modifiers for further comments on this.

The game also requires at least two players, but not more than seven — this isn’t to do with the number eight for a specific reason, but a result of the fact that there aren’t enough cards for more than seven players — with a ready supply of small coinage or tokens when gambling takes place, and the players arranged as evenly as possible around the table on which the game is to be played. A container able to hold cards should be placed centrally on the table — this is for the discards — along with another container for coins or tokens if gambling is to take place: this is the Pot.

The Cripple Mr Onion pages have been recently updated to refer to The Fat Pack. Older versions of the rules, which may be found all over the Internet, refer to combining a deck with the English or French suits (Clubs, Spades, Hearts and Diamonds) and a deck with the Spanish or Italian suits* (Staves, Swords, Cups and Coins). The challenge was always in finding two such decks that were compatable, with the changes of finding decks with the same backing being practically zero. On the Discworld, of course, the standard deck has eight suits (staves, swords, cups, coins, octagrams, elephants, turtles or terrapins and crowns) but so far as I know there has been little success in producing such a deck on this planet. With the creation of The Fat Pack, however, there now exists an eight-suit deck of playing cards that meets all of the criteria required for playing Cripple Mr Onion.

* More information on the various decks — and on other card games in general, including rules — may be found in The A-Z of Card Games by David Parlett.