Ride The Bus Card Game

“Ride the Bus” is a type of drinking game that uses cards. It requires three to seven players, a deck of cards, and a sufficient amount of alcohol for each of the players. If there are eight players, one has to act as the dealer and not receive a hand. The dealer changes at the end of each round. The game’s objective is to have the lowest cards at the end of the round.

Before the start of the game, the dealer must set up the bus. This is done by setting ten cards face down on the table in a triangle where they don’t overlap. This triangle are arranged in fours, threes, and twos, with the single remaining card placed on the tip towards the dealer.

The game starts with the dealer handing each player, starting from his left, five cards each. The remaining cards will be set aside in a deck to be used on the last part of the round. The dealer then turns open a card from the last row of the bus. All players who have cards with the similar face as the card picked by the dealer will then be allowed to pick cards equivalent to what they have. If a player has a playable card, that player can choose a player to drink the alcohol.

The game goes on with the dealer continuously showing every card in the bus, making sure that each row is empty before exposing the next card. The round stops once the last card from the bottom row of the bus has been shown.

Once all the cards in the bus have been turned open, all the players count their cards. If no player has more than four cards, the round ends to start a new one. If a player has more than four cards, the person with the most cards has to ride the bus. When two or more players have an identical number of cards, they each need to take a card from the deck alternately, stopping only when the highest card has been picked.

All the cards are then collected from the players, shuffled, and then placed in a separate pile. From this pile, another bus is constructed, with the shuffled cards used to complete the bus. While riding the bus, the players have to keep track of their ranks, each of which correspond to a number of drinks. These ranks are taken from the cards in the bus, and are as follows: Jack=1 drink, Queen=2 drinks, King= 3 drinks, Ace=4 drinks.

The chosen player has to pick a single card from each of the row of the bus, starting from the longest row to the first row. If any of the ranked cards listed above is selected, the player has to drink the corresponding to amount of drinks. All the exposed cards are then removed and replaced with cards from the shuffled deck. The game starts from the top row again, until the bus has been ridden, without turning the last card face up.

This game, like a lot of drinking games, seems complicated at first; but once the players have gotten the hang of it, it becomes apparent that the game actually does not require a lot of thinking—just a lot of card flipping and drinking.