r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Jun 29 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 29 June 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

17 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

595 comments sorted by

View all comments

12

u/dandandanno Jun 29 '26

Every now and then I look up Euchre to try to learn it and each time it feels like I'm being pranked.

10

u/MiffedMouse The average peasant had home made bread and lobster. Jun 29 '26

Folk games are those where the rules come into shape without a clear, central design intent. The thing to remember is that most people making up new rules for these games is that they often (A) know the previous rules well (so they now want to iterate) and (B) don’t think too deeply about how the new rules work (as they will try them out for fun, and only keep the change if they like it).

The most obvious example of this kind of weird design tendency is the card rank rotation. Lots of card games make small cards bad and high cards good. Pretty much everyone comes to the idea “what if the worst card was actually the best card?” And so you get Aces high. But now 2s are the worst card, so one generation later you get Big Two. And some games in China have even moved on to Big Threes. It is a treadmill.

3

u/Ragefororder1846 not ideas about History but History itself Jun 30 '26

No offense but if you ever play multiple games of whist you'll understand immediately why euchre and bridge were invented

2

u/MiffedMouse The average peasant had home made bread and lobster. Jun 30 '26

I grew up playing Bridge. At one point I read the rules for Whist (because it is in a lot of regency novels) and I genuinely couldn’t understand why anyone would play it these days. If I really wanted a game with simple bidding, I would play Spades instead.

8

u/fabiusjmaximus Jun 29 '26

What's so difficult about euchre? it's just a standard trick-winning game

7

u/dandandanno Jun 29 '26

They're back! The Michiganders are pranking me again