Statistics

• Popular Game Pages
• Pages with Recent Interest
• Editor's Choice
• Recently Added Pages
• 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.

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).

Handjass

A Swiss game for up to 4 players. Also known as Sackjass, Butzer or Schläger Jass, this is generally considered the most basic form of the Swiss national game Jass.

Jhyap (Yaniv)

An unusual draw and discard game from Nepal, which has also become popular in Israel. Players get rid of their cards by discarding rummy-like combinations which they have collected.

Durak (Podkidnoy)

Durak is one of the best known card games in Russia and has spread to many east European countries. It can be played by 2-6 people and works well for 4 playing as partners.

Truf

Indonesian game for 4 players. Bid for tricks by placing a card from hand face down. Suit of highest bid determines trumps. Objective is to win or lose tricks depending whether bids add up to more or fewer than the 13 available.

Seep

A four-player partnership game played in the Punjab and some other parts of India. It is related to Royal Casino but with greater scope for skill because all the cards are dealt at the start.

Mighty

Korean trick-taking game for 5 players, 2 against 3 with secret partnerships and some cards with special powers: the mighty, the joker and the ripper.

Cuttle

This 2-player game which appeared in North America in the 1970's is slightly reminiscent of later commercially successful combat games such as Magic the Gathering though the similarity is probably a coincidence.

Skat

National card game of Germany, a game of tricks and trumps for three players using 32 cards. Players bid to decide who will play alone against the other two, aiming to take the majority of the card points.

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.

Notes

The tables of popular pages and pages with recent interest 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.

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.