An epic game of Hen

There's a game our old friends, the Shumates, introduced us to when we lived in Provo.  It's called Hen, pronounced with an "h" like "Achmed" or "loch".  (So should it be Chen?  Hjen?  I don't know!)

The game is pretty simple (to us crazy gamers):

The goal is to end up with the least number of points in your hand.
Each card is worth its face value (aces are 1, eights are 8, face cards are 10, jokers are zero and are wild cards)
Every player starts out with 5 cards.

Play:
On your turn, you switch out the cards in your hand by discarding, then drawing either the top card from the discard pile or the top card of the deck.
You can discard a single card, sets of cards with the same face value (like a bunch of 4's), or runs of 3 or more cards of the same suit (5, 6, 7 of hearts).  Discarding multiple cards is what helps you get a smaller hand.
When you pick up "the top card" from the discard pile, if the person before you discarded a set, you can pick up any of the discarded cards.  If it's a run, you can only pick up a card from the end (like in the case above, you could pick up the 5 or the 7, but not the 6.  So if someone threw out a run and there was a joker in the middle of the run, you couldn't pick up the joker.  LAME.)  You can't pick up a card discarded by the person before the person before you.
When you have 11 or fewer points and you think you have fewer points than all of the other players, you knock.  Everyone else has one more turn (and HAS to take it, even if THEY wanted to knock) except for you (because you know you want to keep your cards!) and then we see who has the least number of points in their hand.

Scoring:
After the person knocks and everyone takes their last turn, everyone counts up the number of points in their hands.  Whoever has the least number of points in their hand gets 0 points.  Everyone else gets the number of points they have in their hand (so if you have an ace, a 6, and a Queen left in your hand at the end of the game, you get 17 points.)  If you were the person who knocked and someone else either ties you OR has fewer points in their hand, then the knocker gets 30 points plus whatever they have in their hand.  (Say I knock with 3 points in my hand and you end up with 2 points and have the least number of points.  You get 0 points and I get 33.  Ouch!)
Whenever someone gets more than 200 points, whoever has the least number of points wins.

Random variation to make the game longer and more entertaining:
If you happen to get exactly 200 points, your score goes down to 150 and the game keeps going.  We like to see how many points we'd have to have in our hand to add up to 170 points and then lose, so we knock and get the 30 some-odd points to try to go back down to 150 points. ;)  (Cheap, huh?)  It's a lot harder to happen to have exactly enough points in your hand after discarding and possibly drawing a random card at the end of your last turn to add up to 200 points.


(If you think this game is complicated ... well ... we like to play Bridge.  If you play Bridge, too, give us a call and we can become friends!  We don't know many people who can play!)

But it happened to Mark!

Mark was having a tough game and kept drawing these crappy cards.  Jorgen knocked, and Mark discarded a card and drew ANOTHER 10-point card.  He was really disappointed until he did the math ... he needed 36 points to get to 200 and happened to get exactly that!  Rotten luck turned to gold!

But it didn't end there.  We like being close to 170 points because then it's easy to figure out how many points you need to have (and then lose when you knock).  We were all pretty close to each others scores at this point in the game and Jorgen needed to knock on 2 points and LOSE (hah! good luck with that one!) to get his score down to 150 again.  And he did it.  We ALL happened to have 2 points in our hands at the end of that round.

The cards kept doing nice things for Jorgen.  He ended up winning the game.  I'll blame it on beginner's luck. ;)