Gamehelpgridpoker

Grid Poker is a card-drafting poker game: draft cards from a grid and build the three best poker hands you can.

Goal

Build three poker hands that beat your opponents' hands, one comparison at a time. The player who wins the most hand-to-hand comparisons wins the game.

Overview

Grid Poker is played over six drafting rounds. Each round a 3×3 grid of nine cards is dealt face up, and players take turns claiming a full row or column. Once the whole 54-card deck (including two Jokers) has been drafted, everyone arranges their cards into three five-card poker hands, which are then compared.

The game shuffles, deals, discards, and ranks everything for you, so you only need to make two kinds of decisions: which line to draft, and how to build your final hands.

Drafting

The deck is dealt out as six separate 3×3 grids of nine cards each. For each grid:

1. The first player picks any row or column and takes all three of those cards.
2. The next player takes one of the remaining rows or columns. Because the first pick removes a line, this second pick is either three cards or two cards, depending on the line chosen.
3. Any cards still left in the grid are removed automatically: with two players they are discarded; with three players they go to the third player.

The player who picks first rotates each grid, and a fresh grid is dealt until the deck runs out. Over the whole draft you will collect 15 to 18 cards. The game tells you when the final grid is being dealt.

Building hands

After drafting, arrange your cards into three hands of exactly five cards each (15 cards total). If you collected more than 15 cards, the extra cards are simply left out of your hands.

Your three hands are automatically sorted from strongest to weakest for scoring, so you don't need to order them yourself—just decide which five cards go in each hand.

Jokers

There are two Jokers in the deck and they are wild, but they can only be used in a straight, flush, straight flush, or royal flush. A Joker cannot be used to complete a pair, three of a kind, four of a kind, or a full house.

Scoring

The game lines up each player's hands by strength (strongest to weakest) and compares them position by position: best hand vs. best hand, then second vs. second, then third vs. third.

• 2 players: the winner of each of the three comparisons scores 1 point (3 points available per game).
• 3 players: in each comparison the strongest hand scores 2 points and the second strongest scores 1 point (the weakest scores nothing).

If two hands tie in a comparison, each tied player scores the points for that position (points are not split), and the lower position is skipped. The player with the highest total score wins.

Tie-breaker

If players finish with the same score, the winner is the one whose weakest (third-ranked) hand is strongest. When two otherwise identical hands are compared, the natural hand (no Joker) beats a hand that uses a Joker.

Hand rankings

Standard poker rankings apply. Within the same category, higher cards break ties.

1. Royal Flush – 10, J, Q, K, A all of the same suit.
2. Straight Flush – five cards in sequence, all the same suit.
3. Four of a Kind – four cards of the same rank.
4. Full House – three of a kind plus a pair.
5. Flush – five cards of the same suit, not in sequence.
6. Straight – five cards in sequence, not all the same suit.
7. Three of a Kind – three cards of the same rank.
8. Two Pair – two different pairs.
9. Pair – two cards of the same rank.
10. High Card – none of the above; the highest card plays.