It also requires N custom-made decks for N rounds of play
You can make a figgie deck by taking a normal deck of cards and removing 1, 3, 3, and 5 cards from randomly-selected suits. This is easiest to do if you have a non-participant dealer, but if you don’t, it’s not too hard to come up with a protocol that allows you to do this as part of shuffling without anyone knowing the results.
For example: A moves the piles with B watching and C+D looking away, then C removes 1 / 3 / 3 / 5 cards from random piles and shuffles them together with D watching and A+B looking away.
you can just remove 1 card from each suit permanently before playing, leaving 0 / 2 / 2 / 4 to remove each game
you don’t need to split the entire deck into suits, just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those (though I guess in practice the game often separates cards into suits anyway, so maybe this doesn’t matter)
just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those
I don’t think you can do this because at least one person will see which cards are in those piles, and then seeing those cards in game will give them more info than they’re supposed to have. E.g. if they see 9h in one of the piles and then 9h in game, they know hearts isn’t the 8-card suit.
(The rules as written are unclear on this. But I assume that you’re meant to remove cards at random from the suits, rather than having e.g. A-8 in one suit, A-Q in one, and A-10 in the other two. If you did that then getting dealt the Q or J would be a dead giveaway.)
I think all of Ben’s and my proposals have assumed (without saying explicitly) that you shuffle within each suit. If you do that, then I think your concerns all go away? Let me know if you don’t think so.
I think Ben’s proposal is: between rounds, it takes a while to split the whole deck into suits, all hearts in one pile and all spades in another and so on. Instead you can just pick out four hearts, and four spades, and so on, and remove 0/2/2/4 cards from those piles, and shuffle the rest back into the deck. But no matter how you shuffle, I don’t think you can do that without leaking information.
You can make a figgie deck by taking a normal deck of cards and removing 1, 3, 3, and 5 cards from randomly-selected suits. This is easiest to do if you have a non-participant dealer, but if you don’t, it’s not too hard to come up with a protocol that allows you to do this as part of shuffling without anyone knowing the results.
For example: A moves the piles with B watching and C+D looking away, then C removes 1 / 3 / 3 / 5 cards from random piles and shuffles them together with D watching and A+B looking away.
right, and as further small optimisations:
you can just remove 1 card from each suit permanently before playing, leaving 0 / 2 / 2 / 4 to remove each game
you don’t need to split the entire deck into suits, just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those (though I guess in practice the game often separates cards into suits anyway, so maybe this doesn’t matter)
I don’t think you can do this because at least one person will see which cards are in those piles, and then seeing those cards in game will give them more info than they’re supposed to have. E.g. if they see 9h in one of the piles and then 9h in game, they know hearts isn’t the 8-card suit.
(The rules as written are unclear on this. But I assume that you’re meant to remove cards at random from the suits, rather than having e.g. A-8 in one suit, A-Q in one, and A-10 in the other two. If you did that then getting dealt the Q or J would be a dead giveaway.)
I think all of Ben’s and my proposals have assumed (without saying explicitly) that you shuffle within each suit. If you do that, then I think your concerns all go away? Let me know if you don’t think so.
I think Ben’s proposal is: between rounds, it takes a while to split the whole deck into suits, all hearts in one pile and all spades in another and so on. Instead you can just pick out four hearts, and four spades, and so on, and remove 0/2/2/4 cards from those piles, and shuffle the rest back into the deck. But no matter how you shuffle, I don’t think you can do that without leaking information.