Six Card Golf Game Rules

(Above shows the set up of a traditional Six Card Golf game)

Card Game Rules

Six Card Golf is a game for 2-4 people and played with a standard 52 playing card deck along with two Jokers. The objective of Six Card Golf is to have the fewest number of points after 9 rounds or “holes”.

For more classic card games, check out our guides for Egyptian Rat Screw and Solitaire.

If you are looking for cards to play Six Card Golf with, check out a standard pack here or one of our latest arrivals here.

Set Up

Before gameplay can begin, a dealer must be selected. Each player draws one card from a shuffled deck. The player with the lowest card becomes the dealer. The dealer shuffles the deck and passes out 6 cards faced down to each player in a clockwise fashion. The remaining cards are placed in the center of the table. The top card is then drawn face up and placed next to the deck.

Without looking at their hand, players arrange their cards in a 3x2 grid.

How to Play

Play begins with the player left of the dealer and proceeds clockwise. On the first turn of every player, two of their cards are turned upright.  On their turn, players decide to either draw from the downturn deck in the middle of the group or from the upturn pile. If they want to keep the card drawn, the card will take the place of any card in in their 3x2 grid. The card replaced will then be turned upright if it isn’t already and placed in the upright pile.

Once a player turns all of their cards upright, they are out and every other player has one more turn in the round. After the round has ended, all downturn cards are flipped over.

If the game is still going and the downturn deck runs out, the upright pile is shuffled to form a new downturn deck. The top card then forms the new upright pile.

Scoring

Points are tallied based the type of cards and their arrangement in the columns.

            Aces are worth 1 point.

            Cards 2-10 are worth their face value.

            Queens and Jacks are worth 10 points.

            Kings are worth 0 points.

            Jokers are worth negative 2 points.

If two cards in the same column form a matching pair of the same value, the point total for that column is 0.

The player with the lowest score at the end of 9 rounds wins.

There are many variant ways of playing Six Card Golf, the most common one being where the Jokers are not used and instead the 2s score minus 2 points.

For more information about Six Card Golf, check out Wikipedia's article here or Pagat's article here.

Looking for more card games to play?  Check out this article:

40+ Great Card Games For All Occasions

About the author: John Taylor is a content writer and freelancer through the company Upwork.com. You may view his freelancing profile here. He has a B. A. in English, with a specialty in technical writing, from Texas A&M University and a M. A. in English from the University of Glasgow. You may view his previous articles about card games here and his LinkedIn profile here.