The Faces Have It

Every card game takes the same deck of cards and puts those faces to different uses.  In order to understand how to successfully play a new card game you have to be able to understand how the familiar cards will operate in a new system.  With the Hand n Foot game, some of the cards may not even look familiar to you.  But by figuring out what each card’s purpose is within the game, you will be well on your way to understanding this challenging and entertaining card play.

Aside from having your numerical cards, you also have several face cards that serve special functions within the game.  The face cards include: the lady, the lord, and the villain. You also have wild cards that have their own purpose as well.  The lady can be used to further the play in two separate ways.  First, she can be used as a discard to block the following player from picking up the discarded stack.  She can also be added to the “clean group,” which gives the player a bonus of 100 extra points.  However, if she is still in a player’s hand when the opponent goes out she will count 500 points against the player.  Meanwhile, the lord simply functions as the numerical cards do.  He is the card of highest value with a count of 20.  The villain, on the other hand, can be used much like the lady.  He blocks a player from picking up the discarded stack.  However, the villain can only be played as a discard; he cannot be melded or played in a group. Still, if a player is caught with a villain in hand, the card counts nothing against him or her.

Hand n Foot is a game that is somewhat complicated by the fact that there are two different wild cards and they do not have the exact same values.  The joker has a value of 50 points, while the jester only has a value of 25 points.  They can be used to start a group, make up their own group, or as a defense in freezing the deck.  For Hand n Foot, understanding your face cards will make your game play much more precise and interesting