A favorite game of mine to play with a large group of friends is Nertz. I’ll briefly describe its mechanics. In Nertz, each player has a deck of cards. This game is basically group solitaire where everyone begins by placing four cards face up that they’ll use as work piles, and to the right of the fourth card is a face-down pile of thirteen cards with the top card flipped face up (nertz pile). The remaining cards are kept in the player’s hand where they can look at every third card and contribute that card to a work pile or the shared foundation piles in the middle of the table (like solitaire). The first person to eliminate all their cards from the nertz pile calls “nertz” and the round ends where each card left in the nertz pile is -2 points while each card put in a foundation pile is +1 point.
From the mechanics I’ve mentioned, several fun dynamics that I enjoy about this game in large group settings are the simultaneous gameplay and the direct competition that arises between players trying to offload as many cards onto the foundation piles as possible. The larger the group, the more chaotic the gameplay becomes as you have plenty of foundation piles to add cards to but if you’re too busy contributing to your work piles instead of keeping track of if there’s a foundation pile, you can put your 2 of hearts on, another player will swoop in and steal that opportunity from you. As such, you have to selectively multitask between tracking the foundation piles to offload the cards in your hand/working pile while also trying to add cards from your nertz pile into the working piles or foundation piles to minimize the points docked against your score.
