History of Somerset
Somerset was invented by Arthur J. Hodges (1870–1946) of Carroll, Iowa. The original game appeared in 1903 and the far more popular Double Somerset followed in 1913. Hodges published it himself through The Some’R’Set Card Company of Chicago, sold the rights to Parker Brothers around 1934, and they printed it until about 1960.
The inventor
Hodges was born in 1870 and married in 1891, arriving in Carroll, Iowa in 1896. He worked as a court clerk and then as a mail clerk, spending many years on the mail trains of the Chicago & North Western Railway. He copyrighted the game and drew royalties on it for years before selling to Parker Brothers.
His daughter-in-law summarised its appeal simply: “The game is easily learned, it is not a game of numerals or fractions. The lower numbers on the cards merely represent suits and the upper numbers the individual value of each card in the suit.”
The three versions
| Version | Year | Cards | Players | Game |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single Somerset | 1903 | 28 | 2–4 | 50 points |
| Double Somerset | 1913 | 50 | 2–6 | 66 points |
| Triple Somerset | 2009 | 92 | 5–8 | 99 points |
Triple Somerset is the modern one, created in 2009 by Jerry Childs of Ludington, Michigan, because six or eight players sharing a 50-card deck left everybody with too few cards. Childs also compiled the survey of competing rulesets that makes it possible to say precisely where the published rules disagree.
Where it is still played
Somerset never became a national game, but it took deep root in a few places and stayed there. Minden, Nebraska is the best known: Minden Hardware sold decks for decades and the Senior Center still plays a house variant with its own bidding rules. There are also long-standing groups in Ludington, Michigan, and scattered families who learned it from a grandparent and kept a worn deck in a drawer.
That is the reason this site exists. The decks are out of print, the people who know the game are not getting younger, and a card game survives only as long as somebody can still find a fourth.
Why “Somerset”?
It is a pun, not a place. You bid how many points you expect to take, and if you fall short you are set — penalised double the difference. As the 1905 rules put it: “In bidding, zeal to win sometimes outweighs judgment and Some are Set.” The game has been printed as Some’R’Set, Some R Set, Some-R-Set and SomeRset, which is why players spell it half a dozen different ways.