Cucumber
BGG rank
BGG #30,848
BGG rating
4.6

Cucumber

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Rules assistance for Cucumber

Plain-language explanations of turns, card effects and disputed situations, with official source references and saved question history.

  • 30 min
  • Complexity 1.2/5

Rules assistant for Cucumber

What would you like to know?

Answers come from the official rulebook, with the page to check.

Cucumber is a board game released in 1970 for 3–7 players and 30 minutes per game. Its main mechanics are Trick-taking.

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About the game

From Dave Parlett's The Penguin Book of Card Games: Called Gurka in Swedish and Ogórek in Polish, this Baltic gambling game may be played for either money or for a simple point-score. Each player is dealt six cards, ranking upwards 23456789TJQKA. The aim is to avoid taking the last trick. Each trick is led by the winner of the previous trick (the first trick is led by the player to the dealer's left). Each in turn must then play a card equal to or higher in rank than the previous card played. If they cannot, they then must play their lowest card. Whoever plays the highest card, or the last played if equally high, wins the trick. Whoever wins the last trick scores penalty points equal to the face value of the card they won the trick with (as does anyone who played a card of the same rank), counting Ace 14, King 13, Queen 12, and Jack 11. A player reaching 30 points is a "cucumber" and drops out of the game.

Categories

Mechanics

Publishers

  • (Public Domain)

Questions and answers

Cucumber supports 3–7 players according to the catalogue. This range comes from the publisher’s listed player count, so the game can be set up for any group size within it. Some setups, rules and scoring details may still vary by player count, so check your edition’s rulebook for the exact configuration.