OBJECTIVE OF JAMES BOND: Be the first player to get four of the same number cards in all of their card piles.
NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 2 – 3
NUMBER OF CARDS: 52
RANK OF CARDS: A (High), K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2,
TYPE OF GAME: Matching
AUDIENCE: Family
THE OBJECTIVE OF JAMES BOND
The aim of James Bond is to be the first person to get four of the same number cards in all of the piles placed in front of you. If no player could make all four (six) of their card piles match, then the player with the most completed card piles is the winner.
HOW TO DEAL
Deal 48 cards into piles of four among each of the players. The remaining 4 cards are placed in the middle, face up. If you’re playing with two players, they’ll receive six piles of four, whereas a game with three players would have four piles of four. No jokers are used.
HOW TO PLAY
As standard, shuffle a 52-card deck that has had the Joker cards removed from it. Deal 48 of those 52 cards evenly between your players, ensuring that each of their card piles has four cards, and no more. The final four cards are placed in the middle of the players, face-up, for all to see.
The dealer counts down from 3 and says “Go!”. Once this happens, all of the players pick up one of their card piles. If you have three cards that are all a 2, and there is a 2 card in the middle, you can discard the card that you have in your pile that isn’t a 2 and pick up the 2 from the middle in its place.
Players cannot hold more than four cards at a time – this means that they cannot look at their other card piles while trying to match up the pile they’re currently holding, and they also can’t pick up any cards in the middle until they’ve put one of their own cards down.
Discarded cards always go to the middle to replace the card the player is taking to complete their card pile. A pile is not complete unless it has all four matching number cards in it.
HOW TO WIN
When a player has four of a kind in all of their piles, and their piles are face up to show that they are complete, they can call “James Bond!” to end the game and show that they are the winner of that round.
OTHER VERSIONS OF JAMES BOND
There are alternative versions of James Bond for four players, where two players would play in a team against another two players, sharing six piles of four cards between each team, and looking at two piles of their cards at the same time. Again, in this situation, no player should be holding more than four cards at any one time, even while working together to complete card piles.
Technically, this card game doesn’t need a dealer, but having a neutral referee is always helpful with competitive card games.
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