Golf Rules — How to Play and Keep Score

Setup

Use one deck for up to four players and two decks beyond that. Deal each player a face-down grid — six cards in two rows of three is the most common — and lay the rest face down as the stock with one card turned up as the discard. Before play starts every player turns two of their own cards face up and leaves the rest hidden.

How many can play

Two to eight. One 52-card deck, plus jokers if you use them, serves up to four players; add a second deck beyond that so the stock lasts the hole.

Nine holes or eighteen

A game is nine deals — nine holes — by default, the Number of holes setting. Eighteen is the choice for a long session and the norm for the quick four-card layout, where each hole is over in a few turns.

How to play

On your turn take the top card of the stock or the top of the discard pile. Swap it for any card in your layout, face up or face down, and discard the card it replaced; a card drawn from the stock may instead be discarded straight away, but a card taken from the discard pile must be used. A swapped-in card stays face up, so the layout gradually reveals itself. The hole ends when a player has all their cards face up, or when a player knocks and everyone else takes one final turn.

Scoring

Turn every layout face up and add it together.

• Ace = 1
• 2 to 10 = face value (2 counts as −2 if that setting is on)
• Jack and queen = 10
• King = 0
• Joker = −2

Then apply cancellation: two cards of the same rank in the same column both score 0, whatever they would otherwise be worth. So a column of two queens is 0 rather than 20. In the nine-card layout, three matching cards in a column also cancel to zero. Cards only cancel once — in a four-card column of matching cards, all four score zero.

A six-card hole typically lands between about 0 and 40, and jokers or a fully cancelled layout can drop it below zero. Write the hole total in that player's cell.

What the joker is worth

Minus two, if you shuffle jokers into the deck — the best card in the game, and the Joker is worth setting if your table plays it differently. Leave the jokers out to ignore it. Kings are the other free card at zero, and twos are worth two unless the Twos count minus two house rule is on, which makes them a small bonus as well.

The knock penalty

If the player who knocked does not have the strictly lowest hole score, they take the penalty: add 10 points by default, or double their hole score if that setting is chosen. Tied for lowest still counts as a failed knock.

Ending the game

After the ninth hole the lowest cumulative total wins. Ties are usually settled with a sudden-death tenth hole. The app records the tie as a shared win, so raise the number of holes in match settings to open that extra hole.

Common variations

Four-, eight- and nine-card layouts all have followings. Some groups let matching cards cancel in rows as well as columns, or anywhere in the layout, which sends scores much lower. Eighteen holes is standard for the short four-card version.