Hexathlon Card Game Rules

Hexathlon packs six small games into one. You play six rounds in a row, and each round has its own rules. In some rounds you want to avoid tricks, in others you grab as many as you can, and one round is a little solitaire in the middle of it all. It works for 3–5 players and is best with 4. Set aside 40 to 55 minutes.

You need a standard 52-card deck without jokers and something to keep score with. The goal is to have the fewest points once all six rounds are done.

Hexathlon is the bigger sibling of Pentathlon: the first five rounds are the same, but Fan Tan is played a little differently and a sixth round with trumps is added. If you want even more, there is also Heptathlon with seven rounds.

A standard 52-card deck, no jokers. Every card is dealt out in every round. In the five trick rounds all players need the same number of cards, so remove one or two red twos if the deck doesn't divide evenly.

• 3 players: remove one red two (51 cards ÷ 3 = 17 cards each)
• 4 players: use the whole deck (52 cards ÷ 4 = 13 cards each)
• 5 players: remove two red twos (50 cards ÷ 5 = 10 cards each)

For the Fan Tan round, put the red twos back and use the full deck. There it doesn't matter if someone gets one card more than the others.

You also need a pen and paper, since the points from each round are added together at the end.

Card values stay almost the same throughout, with Fan Tan as the exception:

• Rounds 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6: ace is highest, then king, queen, jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2
• Round 4 (Fan Tan): king is highest and ace is lowest

It's easy to forget that the ace swaps places in Fan Tan, so remind each other before that round starts.

The first round is played for tricks in the usual way, and the point is to take as few as possible. Ideally none.

The player to the left of the dealer leads the first card. Everyone else must follow suit if they can. If you can't follow suit, you may throw off any card, but then you can't win the trick. The highest card of the led suit takes the trick, and whoever wins it leads to the next one.

Scoring: each trick you take is worth 1 point.

The second round plays exactly like the first, but now only clubs matter. You'd rather not collect ♣️ in your tricks.

• Same trick rules as round 1
• Shed clubs when someone leads a different suit
• If you have to take a trick, take one with no clubs in it

Scoring: each ♣️ in your tricks is worth 1 point.

In the third round you steer clear of the four queens. They are expensive.

• Same trick rules as before
• Stay alert when high cards are led, because that's when a queen can drop
• Try to unload your own queens onto tricks that others win

Scoring: each queen is worth 4 points, so 16 points are in play in the round.

The fourth round is a solitaire dropped into the middle of the game, and this is the big difference from Pentathlon. In Hexathlon both sixes and sevens can start a new stack, one for each suit.

• Play a seven and you build upward from it: 7, 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, king
• Play a six and you build downward: 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, ace (ace is lowest)

So each suit ends up with two stacks. A high stack that starts on the seven and climbs, and a low stack that starts on the six and drops.

The player holding ♥️7 starts the round by laying it down. After that, on your turn you must play a card if you can: either start a new stack with a six or a seven, or extend a stack already on the table. If you can't play anything, you pass.

Scoring:

• Each pass is worth 1 point
• Each card left in your hand when someone runs out is worth 1 point
• The first player to get rid of every card scores 0

Now everything flips. In the fifth round you want to take as many tricks as you can.

• Same trick rules as rounds 1 to 3
• Use your high cards to pull in tricks
• Hold your aces until you need them

Scoring: each trick is worth -1 point. This is the round where you claw back points from earlier.

In the sixth and final round you play Grand again, but this time with a trump suit.

First you settle the trump. Draw a random card from the well-shuffled deck and turn it over. The suit of that card is trump for the round. Put the card back, shuffle again, and deal out all the cards as in round 5.

Trumps work as they do in Amerikaner. You must follow the led suit if you can. If you can't, you may either throw off a card or play a trump. When a trick contains trumps, the highest trump wins it. If nobody trumped, the highest card of the led suit wins.

The aim is the same as in round 5: take as many tricks as possible.

Scoring: each trick is worth -1 point.

Write down the points after each round:

• Round 1: number of tricks × 1 point
• Round 2: number of ♣️ × 1 point
• Round 3: number of queens × 4 points
• Round 4: number of passes + cards left in hand
• Round 5: number of tricks × -1 point
• Round 6: number of tricks × -1 point

Add it all up at the end. The player with the lowest total wins.

Example: Anna scores 3 + 5 + 8 + 7 - 4 - 6 = 13 points, Bob scores 5 + 2 + 4 + 9 - 6 - 3 = 11 points. Bob wins.

A few things worth keeping in mind:

• General: keep some track of which cards have been played
• Rounds 1 to 3: get rid of high cards early when you can, so you're not stuck holding them
• Round 3: watch closely when a suit is led high while a queen is still out
• Round 4: if you hold both the six and the seven of a suit, you control when both of that suit's stacks can open
• Rounds 5 and 6: now high cards are gold, so hang on to your aces until the end
• Round 6: a long suit becomes very strong if it happens to be trump, though you won't know that until the card is turned

Hexathlon is a Norwegian game also known as Sekskamp and Kanin, and the rules vary a little from family to family. Both the order of the rounds and which rounds are included can differ where you play.

• Fixed trump: some skip the card draw in the last round and agree on the trump suit in advance, for example ♠️
• Plain Fan Tan: play it as in Pentathlon and only the sevens start stacks, building both up and down from them
• Double last round: the final round gives -2 points per trick for a bigger swing
• More rounds: for a longer evening, move on to Heptathlon with seven rounds

These rules describe Hexathlon as an extension of Pentathlon: the five fixed rounds Pass, Clubs, Queens, Fan Tan, and Grand, with a Fan Tan where both sixes and sevens start stacks, plus a sixth round with trumps. The lowest total score wins. Both the choice of rounds and their order vary from family to family.