GREG REESE
Arts Editor

I remember the Weir parent’s in Freaks and Geeks asking their kids, Lindsay and Sam, if they wanted to stay home and play the game of Pit. Acting under the assumption that this would be a night of dull and wholesome family fun, the kids thought better of it, and missed out on one of the loudest, zaniest card games of all time.

Furthermore, a high-profile fortune-teller invented the game of Pit (or at least made significant adaptations to the most popular version): Edgar Cayce has appeared numerous times on the cover of National Enquirer for his prescient visions of the future. Of course, like most psychics he has his skeptics and his supporters. Cayce was big on the whole City of Atlantis thing, but back to the game itself.

The rules of Pit are simple. Everyone plays at the same time, screaming out the number of cards of the same suit (crop) that they want to trade. The number of suits in the game should match the number of players. Once someone has all cards of the same suit, they yell, “Corner on!” and show their hand.

Two other cards, the Bear and the Bull, make things just a little wackier. The Bull is a wild card; while the Bear makes the person holding it at the end of a round lose 20 points. It’s the shits — or, should I say, the pits! If you trade someone the Bear, that’s called “slipping the Bear.”

Really, that’s all you need to know for the game of Pit. Its simplicity and its volume lend it to spicing up a sober evening or taking that drunken hangout to the next level. The family-friendly marketing and old-fashioned feel of Pit have probably kept it more obscure than it ought to have been.

In the original version you traded flax, hay, oats, rye, corn, barley and wheat (flax is the worst in terms of value, and so it was that getting too much flax was dubbed “getting flaxed!”).

They have modernized the game now, and you can trade coffee and soybeans; but personally, I don’t really see the difference. The whole point of the game is to yell loudly and slip people the Bear, not to simulate the realities of trade in any way.

As Freaks and Geeks amply pointed out, Pit is seen as a game of the past (even in 1980). You can still buy a copy of this card game for relatively cheap but in many ways card games are a thing of the past (except poker; poker is a different story). This could change, but I’m not going to hold my breath on a massive Pit revival. Still, I definitely recommend picking up a copy of this game. It can be learned in a deep state of intoxication and the novelty takes a good while to wear off.