Statistics

• Popular Game Pages
• Pages with Recent Interest
• Editor's Choice
• Recently Added Pages
• Difficulty, Popularity and Trend in Pagt panels
• Notes

Popular Game Pages

These are the game rules pages that had most visitors in each of the last three months - see notes for further details. The top 5 pages for the most recent month are listed on the home page.

Pages with Recent Interest

These are pages that have had a notable increase in visitors in each of the last three months, relative to the average number of visitors in previous months - see notes for further details. The top 5 pages with increased visits in the latest month are shown on the home page.

Editor's Choice

Recommendations from the editor (i.e. me - John McLeod). These are games that I have enjoyed playing, and which you may find worth trying if you are looking for something different to play.

1000

This 3-player 24-card game is popular in Eastern Europe: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltic States. It is a point-trick game with extra points for marriages, which change the trump suit when declared.

Dehla Pakad

Indian trick taking card game for 4 players in fixed partnerships in which the aim is to capture tens. Cards played to tricks are only captured when the same player wins two consecutive tricks.

Boonaken

A dutch Jass game that works well for 4-6 players. If you play and win twice you are out of the game and safe. If you play and lose twice or are the last player in, you buy the drinks.

Snip Snap Snorum

Traditional round game for 4-8 players in which players try to get rid of their cards by playing them in ascending sequences of up to 5 cards in suit. There is a second version in which equal ranked cards are played.

Kleurenwiezen

A popular Belgian trick-taking card game for four players with objectives and partnerships determined by the bidding.

Go Stop

A popular Korean game for 2 or 3 players using flower cards. Having collected enough scoring combinations to win, you have to decide whether to stop the game or try to improve your score at the risk of losing everything.

Botifarra

Catalan trick-taking game for 4 players in partnership. The very strict rules of play allow many deductions about the location of cards.

Crash (13-card Brag)

British game for four or fewer players in which players choose how to divide a 13-card hand into four 3-card Brag hands and an odd card. Each player's hands are ordered best to worst and the corresponding hands are compared.

Panjpar

This two-player card game from Afghanistan is featured in Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner. Panjpar means five cards, the number initially held by each player. The aim is to be the first to get rid of all your cards in the endgame, after the drawing deck runs out.

Burraco (Italian)

A relative of Canasta which has become immensely popular in Italy since the 1990's. There are 4 players in partnerships, both runs and sets can be melded, and each team has a third hand to be used when a player runs out of cards.

Mus

This popular 4-player Spanish game of betting and bluffing is unusual among vying games, in that it is played without money and with partnerships.

Dou Dizhu (斗地主)

This Chinese climbing game has become very popular in the last 20 years. One player volunteers to play alone as the 'landlord' against the other players in partnership. Playable combinations include the bomb (four of a kind), the rocket (complete set of jokers) and the quadplex set (four of a kind plus two single cards or pairs).

Recently Added Pages

These are the new pages most recently added to the website. See also the what's new page for a periodic survey of major additions and modifications to the site, and the site map for a complete list of pages showing when each was last updated.

Difficulty, Popularity and Trend in Page Panels

Some pages of game rules have a panel in the top right containing a brief description, some links to help find related games, and some 'ratings':

• Difficulty. From 1 to 5 stars ⭐representing the subjective assessment of the editor combining two factors: how difficult or complex the rules are, and how difficult it is to learn to play the game well.
• Popularity. From 1 to 5 hearts ❤️. Games are ranked in order of the average number of people (actually different IP addresses) per month who visited the game rules page in the last 6 months. Top 10% get 5 hearts, next 10% 4 hearts, next 20% 3 hearts, next 30% 2 hearts, bottom 30% 1 heart. (The top 6 games under this ranking are also listed on the home page as 'most popular games'.)
• Trend. From 1 to 5 flames 🔥️. The number of visitors in the most recent month is compared with the average per month over the preceding five months, and the significance of the change is estimated using a statistical technique described below. The pages are then ranked in order from most significant increase down to most significant decrease. The top 10% are given 5 flames, the next 20% 4 flames, the middle 40% 3 flames, the next 20% 2 flames and the bottom 10% 1 flame. (The 6 games or pages with the most significant increase are also listed on the home page under 'recent interest'.)

Notes

The tables of popular pages and pages with recent interest on this page are based on the number of visitors in a month, estimated on the basis of the number of different hosts (IP addresses) requesting the page. The 'popular pages' table includes only English language pages containing game rules, while the 'recent interest' table covers all English language pages that have existed for at least six months. Shortened versions of these table showing only the top 6 games also appear on the home page.

To find pages that have recently become more popular, the expected number of visitors per month is estimated on the basis of the previous 5 months, and compared to the number for the current month. The calculation is as follows:

1. For each English language page, for each month, the number of different hosts visiting the page (h) is divided by the total number of hosts visiting pagat.com that month (t). This normalisation is to correct for seasonal fluctuations in the total number of page views: it probably does not make much difference to the result.
2. We model visits to a page as a Poisson process, and use the average of h/t for the previous 5 months to estimate its rate.
3. Assuming this Poisson process, we use the Chernoff bound to estimate the probablity that h/t for the current month is greater than or equal to the observed value. Thanks to Niall Cardin for drawing our attention to this approximation.
4. We rank the pages in order of this probability. The lower the probability, the more remarkable it is that so many hosts visited the page in the latest month.