About this site

Getting the rules right

Somerset has been printed by several publishers across a century and they do not agree with each other. Rather than pick one quietly, every primary source was transcribed word for word: Hodges 1913, Parker Brothers 1934 and 1947, Minden Hardware, somersetcards.com, BoardGameGeek, the Minden Nebraska Senior Center, and somersetgame.com itself.

They disagree in five places — what happens to the two spare cards, whether the bidder must lead trump, when the 0/0 may be played, the minimum bid, and whether a side that did not win the bid still scores. All five are settings, so you can play the version your table plays. Somersetgame.com’s own rules are the default.

Every worked example printed in those sources is a test in the code, quoting the line it came from. The game also checks itself continuously: a deal must always contain exactly 24 points across exactly 12 tricks, no card may be duplicated or lost, and there must always be a legal play available.

The one number nobody wrote down

The rules name the seven red count cards and say they total twelve points, but no published source lists what each one is worth — they all just say the value is “shown in the circle to the right of the numerals”. That is fine if you are holding a deck and useless if you are not.

So the values were reconstructed and then confirmed three separate ways:

• the printed card artwork, which shows the 1/2 and 2/4 with a circled one and the S/S with a circled three;
• the text inside somersetgame.com’s official print-your-own deck PDF, which carries the value beside every card;
• the arithmetic of Triple Somerset, a different deck by a different designer, whose published card-removal totals only work if the same scheme is used.

All three agree: 1/2, 2/4 and 3/6 score one; 4/8, 5/10 and 6/12 score two; the S/S scores three.

Privacy

There is nothing to be private about. The game runs entirely in your browser — there is no server, no database and no account. Your game in progress and your settings are stored in your own browser and are never sent anywhere. Clear your browser data and they are gone.

Credits and corrections

The game is Arthur J. Hodges’s. The rules, history, card artwork and the survey of competing rulesets are published at somersetgame.com, maintained by the Childs and Wiersma families; the rules survey was compiled by Jerry Childs of Ludington, Michigan. This is an unofficial fan project with no affiliation to Parker Brothers.

If your table plays a rule this site gets wrong, that is worth knowing — the whole point is to be faithful, and a variant nobody recorded is exactly the kind of thing that disappears when a game stops being played.