Shichi Narabe

Shichi Narabe (in Japanese : 7並べ) is the name for a fairly simple card game for 3 or more players. It is played with the international 52-card deck. There appear to be several versions of this game, so these rules are rather generic.

Aces are low.

How to play:

Shuffle the deck and deal 13 cards to each player. (There is a version of this game using jokers, but it is uncommon and will not be explained here.) Next the order of play is determined, although there is no specified method for doing so.

Next, the players set up the layout. They remove the sevens from their hands and arrange them into a column on the table, leaving plenty of room on each side of the column. This will eventually grow into a tableau of 13 columns and 4 rows.

On his turn, a player may either place a card from his hand onto the table or take no action. He may choose to take no action a maximum of three times per game.

A card can be played only if there is already a card on the table matching it in suit and adjacent to it in rank. For instance, at the start of play, since all the 7s are on the table, the first card played must be a 6 or 8, of any suit. If one starts off by playing 6♥, the second card may be 5♥, 6♣, 6♦, 6♠, 8♥, 8♣, 8♦, or 8♠. The cards are arranged in rows, each row representing a suit.

The game ends either when one player runs out of cards (in which case, the remaining players receive penalty scoring for cards left in their hands) or when all players run out of cards (in which case, the players are ranked as first, second, third and fourth place, in the order in which they ran out of cards).

This game is also sometimes referred to as "Sevens", or "Seven Up". Confusingly, another game, Fan Tan, is also sometimes known as Sevens.