Shichi Narabe

Shichi Narabe is a fairly simple Japanese card game for 4 players. It is played with the international 52-card deck. There appears to be several versions of this game, so these rules are rather generic.

Aces are low.

How to play:

Set up the layout by removing the sevens from the deck and place them in a column on the table, making sure that there is enough room on each side of the column to eventually turn this into a 13-by-4 array of cards.

Shuffle the remaining 48 cards and deal 12 cards to each player. (There is a version of this game using jokers, in which each player receives 13 cards, but I don't know the details.) Decide who goes first somehow.

On your turn, you can either (a) place a card from your hand onto the table or (b) no action. You may choose (b) a maximum of three times per game.

You can play a card only if there is a card on the table which matches it in suit and is adjacent to it in rank. For instance, at the beginning of the game, since all the 7s are on the table, the first card played can be any 6 or any 8. If it is 6♥, the second card played can be any of the 8 cards (5♥ 6♣ 6♦ 6♠ 8♥ 8♣ 8♦ 8♠). The cards on the table are aranged in rows, one row to a suit, to make this rule easy to follow.

The game ends either when one player runs out of cards (in which case, the remaining players receive penalty scoring for cards left in their hands) or when all players run out of cards (in which case, the players are ranked as first, second, third and fourth place, in the order in which they ran out of cards).

This game is also sometimes referred to as "Fan Tan".