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.

Skitgubbe

A popular Swedish game for three players. In the first phase players collect cards by taking tricks; in the second phase they try to get rid of those cards by beating the opponents' cards, the last player with cards being the loser.

Clobyosh

Variously known as Clobyosh, Kalabrias, Klabberjass or Bela, this point-trick game with melds is widely acknowledged as one of the most skilful two-player card games.

Königrufen (Tarock)

Austrian Tarock game for 4 with a large choice of contracts. In some the bidder plays alone, in others the bidder chooses a partner by calling a king.

Casino (Swazi)

In this unusual version of Casino played in Eswatini and Lesotho, players can steal cards from the top of their opponents' capture piles to help with building piles for later capture.

Barbu

A 4-player compendium game with 7 contracts: each player must play each contract once. It was enhanced in the 1960's by Bridge players who introduced doubles which create loose alliances between players with a common interest.

Pegs and Jokers

North American partnership race game for 4, 6 or 8 players in which cards are used to move pegs or marbles around a (normally home-made) board.

Piquet

Classic game for two players, which has deservedly survived with very little change since the 16th century. There are scores for longest suit, best sequence, best set of 3 or 4 of a kind and for tricks.

Schieber Jass

Four-player partnership version of the Swiss national card game. It is a point-trick game with some extra points for declarations, in which you may play a trump to any trick even if you have a card of the suit led.

Tarokk (Hungarian)

In this 4-player tarot game from Hungary partners are chosen by calling the XX and there are multiple objectives including catching the XXI and winning the last trick with the I (pagat ultimo).

Svoi Kozyri

Russian game in which you must either beat the previous player's card or pick up cards from the play pile. The last player holding cards is the loser. Good for 4 players: each has their own trump suit.

Zhăo Péngyou (找朋友)

A Chinese trick-taking game for up to 12 players using multiple decks with jokers, in which sets of identical cards and sequence of sets can be played. In each deal the trump maker calls cards to form new teams.

Scopone

Scopone is a skilful Italian four-player partnership game in which cards or sets of cards are captured from the table by playing cards of equal value.

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.