Sheng Ji

Sheng ji

Card game played in Nanjing, China
Origin	China
Type	Trick-taking
Players	4 (or more)
Cards	54, 108 or 162
Deck	Anglo-American
Play	Counter-clockwise
Random chance	medium

Sheng ji is a family of point-based, trick-taking card games played in China and in Chinese immigrant communities. They have a dynamic trump, i.e., which cards are trump changes every round. As these games are played over a wide area with no standardization, rules vary widely from region to region.

The game can be played with multiple decks of cards. With one deck, it may be called dǎ bǎi fēn (打百分, 'competing for a hundred points') or sìshí fēn (四十分, 'forty points'); with two decks, as is most commonly played, it may be called bāshí fēn (八十分, 'eighty points'), tuō lā jī (拖拉機, 'tractor'), shuāng kōu (雙摳, 'double digging out'), or shuāng shēng (雙升, 'double upgrade'); with three decks, it may be called zhǎo péngyǒu (找朋友, 'looking For friends').

The article below mainly describes the bashi fen variant, with players playing with two decks and in fixed partnerships.

The game is played with four players in fixed partnerships, with players sitting across each other forming a team. Each team has a rank that they are currently playing, henceforth referred to as their score. At the beginning of a match, everyone starts at a score of 2.

The teams are divided into the "declarers" (also known as "defenders") and the "opponents" (also known as "attackers"), which are determined in the process of the game and will change frequently (see below). Ultimately, the purpose of the game is to raise one's own team to the score of above ace, while preventing the other team from doing so.

When a team passes (rather than exactly attains) a score of ace, a match usually ends with their victory. This may takes several hours, so shorter games may end at a lower threshold, or begin with players' scores higher than two. If an even longer game is desired, players can wrap back around to 2 after passing ace.

The game is played with two decks, with two jokers per deck, giving a total of four jokers. The jokers are separated into red and black (or colloquially known as "big" and "small" respectively). Some card manufacturers will make jokers of the same color, which then have to be marked as "red" and "black."