On my list of things I never thought I’d be blogging about, revealing the inside of my refrigerator and now, blogging about the rules of the card game scrunch are right at the top. I have a feeling you’ll hear the rules and say “I know this game. It’s called                 !”

So here we go.

To play, you need at least two players. (The more players the better—it gets exponentially crazier and fun with each additional player.)

Each player needs his / her own standard deck of cards. Jokers aren’t needed.

To set up the game, each player counts 13 cards and places them face up in a stack. This is known as the scrunch pile. Four additional cards are laid out next to the scrunch pile, face up. The start of the game looks like this:

Scrunch cards

In this photo, the 10 of clubs is my scrunch pile.

The game is played similar to double solitaire. In the middle of the table you play cards up, by suit, starting with the Ace and ending with the King. On the four cards next to your Scrunch pile you play down, alternating colors.

Scrunch game

This photo above is very early in the game. You can see that I played the Ace of spades in the middle, and moved the 10 of clubs off my scrunch pile. I also played the 8 of diamonds on the nine of spades.

The object of the game is to be the first one to “scrunch” by playing all the cards in your scrunch pile, and play the most cards in the center. You do this by moving cards off of your scrunch pile and by flipping through your remaining cards by threes, playing the card on top.

Flipping cards

To keep score, you count the number of cards each player gets out into the center. If you were not the player to scrunch, you double the number of cards in your scrunch pile and subtract this from the total number of cards you got out. When I play with my sister we keep a running total, but with the kids we count the winner as the person who scrunches. (This keeps it more interesting for the kids…because each game is a fresh start.)

OK…so guess what Jay just found? He found that there is a game called “Pounce” that seems to be the same game that we call Scrunch. Have you heard of that one?  Here’s a website that does a great job explaining the rules of the game…just in case I missed any fine details.

By the way, there are a couple of differences in how we play and how Pounce is described. The first was mentioned above…we subtract two times the number of cards remaining in the scrunch pile from the number of cards played. This makes it interesting…and can sometimes lead to some hefty negative scores. The other difference is when you get stuck (when all players can’t make a move) we take a card from the top of our pile and move it to the bottom…to mix things up a bit.

enjoy!