How to Play Nertz With Friends!

Nertz is, in essence, is a solitaire card game for 2 or more people. One big difference, though, is that Nertz is a fast-play game. The object of Nertz is to empty your Nertz pile and score more points than your opponents.

Setup Details:

Each player has their own deck of 52 playing cards. There are 13 cards in the Nertz Pile on your left (12 face down, top card face up). Then place 4 cards face up, next to each other, horizontally, to the right of the Nertz Pile. This area is called the River. The rest of the deck is to be held in hand, face down, turning over 3 cards at a time, face up when a game begins. In this Online version, the cards will already be set up for you and will automatically shuffle your deck for you

Game Play Details:

When all players are set up, game can begin. Ready! Go! All Aces go to what we will call the Lake. In other words, each player, plays their Aces to a common area. This gives a Foundation on which to further build. Every player may play on any Ace. The build is in this order: A, 2, 3, 4, etc. until it reaches the King. Each pile must be of the same suit. In this online version the foundation is already set up. Just start playing your aces and building on each pile. Simultaneously, you “turn" over 3 cards at a time with the remaining cards (called The Stock Pile) just like in a game of Solitaire. You may only play the top card of your 3 cards. If it plays, you may play the card that was under it, and so on. It is preprogrammed in this Online version to only allow the top card to be placed first. As you are turning your cards 3 at a time, you are also keeping an eye on the top card of your Nertz Pile. You may play this card either up to the Lake or over to the River (4 cards that are face up on the right). When you play a card, either from your Nertz Pile or your Stock Pile, to the River, it must be played on an opposite colored suit. You are also working backwards in numbers on the 4 River piles. For example, a red 7 would be played on a black 8. Remember, the goal is to empty the Nertz Pile while at the same time accumulating as many points as possible by placing cards in the Lake.

If at anytime during the game play, no card has been played to the Lake for an entire minute the computer will reshuffle your Stockpile, thereby giving new life to the round. If the game comes to a standstill again after the Stockpile has been reshuffled once, the game will end and points will be added accordingly.

Counting up your points:

When a player gets rid of all the cards on there Nertz Pile the round is over. In this online version, the program automatically counts up each player's points and posts it to the screen at the end of each round. If you are curious how the points are counted, here are the rules. All cards played to the Lake are separated according to who played them. In a physical game of Nertz, each player would have their own distinct deck that would have a different design on the back to tell them apart. Likewise, each player counts up the cards left on there Nertz Pile. Each who did not Nertz! doubles the count of left over Nertz Pile cards. This # is then subtracted from their points accumulated in The Lake. All cards from Lake or Nertz pile that are counted are 1 point.

When the game ends without a Nertz, each player will count the cards left on there Nertz Pile. In this case, the card count would NOT be doubled