Sexton Blake

Modestly described as The Latest and Greatest of All Card Games. The pack of 60 cards, split into 4 'suits' of criminal gangs and a further suit representing the law. There are 12 cards in each suit. Each suit's cards are ranked in order, 10, 20, etc. with 120 being the highest. Sexton Blake, and his faithful sidekick Tinker, are the two most valuable law cards, as you would expect. The object is to collect sets of cards by winning tricks. Tricks are won absolutely normally (you must follow suit, if you can't then you may discard or play a trump (the law are the trumps). After all the tricks have been won, each player separates the cards worth 80 or more from his tricks won, and the rest of the cards are put to one side except that, if you do not have as many cards as the player who has the most, you draw enough cards from those set aside, making all the hands equal in the number of cards to play. In the second stage of the game, you continue trick-taking as before but the number of cards won is unimportant. What is important is that you are aiming to collect groups of 3, 4 or 5 cards of the same value. Points are scored by having such sets, with each group scoring the value of the cards in the group. The winner is the one with the highest score after three rounds have been played.