Card game · drinking game · reconstructed from two sheets of loose-leaf
Lay two bases and a head, then call every combo you can find in the three of them. Whatever you miss, the table takes off you.
Worked from the rules — not an example in the notes
Before anyone drinks
Deal battle hands. Three cards each, face down. Nobody looks. These sit out the whole game and only come back for the endgame.
Divide the rest of the deck evenly among the players. That pile is what you play from.
Left of the dealer starts.
Because 1 divides everything, an Ace on a base is a guaranteed factor hit — the notes call this out specifically.
Play two base cards side by side, then lay one head card above them. Read the three cards together and call your combos out loud, adding up the drinks as you go.
Cards can’t be double-spent: “can only form poker hands w/ available cards. once a card [is used] it cannot be re-used elsewhere.”
Every combo you can find in three cards
| Combo | Drinks |
|---|---|
| A base is a factor or multiple of the head | 1each |
| Sum or difference of the bases equals the headboth bases active | 2 |
| Pair across the two basesBB · both bases active | 2 |
| Pair between a base and the headBH · counted as a factor | 1each |
| Flush | 1 |
| Straight | 1 |
| Straight flush6 if one card is a Joker | 9 |
| Both bases are Jokers | 10 |
| Base + head Jokers | 5 |
| Three of a kind — both bases and the head3 × 3 | 9 |
| Three Jokers“eat all drugs in room immediately” | You win |
The actual game
Call fewer drinks than your layout was worth, and anyone at the table can take the difference.
The scoring table is only half the game. The other half is that you have to find your own combos — out loud, in front of everyone who is also looking at your three cards. Every drink you fail to spot is sitting there for whoever calls it first.
Worked from the rules — not an example in the notes
Called by opponents, at the moment the head card is unveiled — unless the dealer calls “safety” first.
| Call | Layout | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 9-11 | 9 – A – A | Kills all pairs |
| 888 — “Prop 8” | 8 – 8 – 8 | Kills all straights |
Calling a tricky bitch move gives all other players a drink.
A layout of three different suits with no combos in it at all — a dead hand.
If the call is publicly accepted, all players drink. If it is not accepted, no player is allowed to drink — but all players are encouraged to.
When the piles run out, players go head 2 head with their battle cards — the three dealt face down at the very start, never looked at, possibly traded away blind.
The winner of head 2 head takes the loser’s bases, gets 3 drinks, and plays the last hand out of the combined cards — forming poker hands from what’s available, with no card re-used once it has been spent.
What the notes don’t settle
Straight flush is written twice, with different numbers. Page 2’s margin says 9 drinks, or 6 with a Joker. Page 1’s bottom corner says 5. The table above uses 9/6 — that note is clearly legible, more specific, and in ink rather than faint pencil — but the 5 could be the later revision. Needs a ruling.
The notes never say who the drinks go to. Drinks are “assigned”; the head-2-head winner “gets 3 drinks”; a tricky bitch move “gives all other players a drink.” That all reads as drinks being a currency you hand out rather than swallow — so calling a big layout means dishing out that many. Inferred, not stated, and it changes how the whole game plays.
Calling aloud never appears as a step. The bitch move only makes sense if it is one, and that matches how the game is remembered — but the paper doesn’t say it.
“Head and ___ are chosen blind.” A word is missing on the page. Almost certainly “bases.”
Does the no-reuse rule apply every turn, or only the final hand? It’s written beside the final-hand sentence and joined to it by an arrow.
Do straights and flushes read across all three cards? Presumably both bases plus the head, but it is never stated.
How factors are counted. “1 drink per factor” — are a 2 and a 4 under an 8 two hits or one? Does the Ace’s auto-factor stack on top of everything else?
Jokers are wild and have fixed payouts. Unclear whether a pair of Jokers on the bases takes the flat 10 or gets played wild for something bigger. Probably not both.
“BBA” and “BH.” Read as base-base and base-head pairs. The trailing A is probably “active,” matching the “both bases active” brace drawn beside those two lines — but what active contrasts with is never explained.
“No synchro” in the Confetti note. The handwriting is clear; the meaning isn’t. Best reading: no two cards relate at all — no pair, no factor, no sum.
“Points / drinks / hits” are used interchangeably. Possibly left over from a points-scored variant.
“Dealer” in “unless dealer calls safety.” The dealer for the round, or the player currently laying cards down? The second reads better in play.
Player count is never given, and the deck divides evenly among players — so it wants a number that divides cleanly, in threes.
Three Jokers is unreachable with one standard deck, which holds two. Either the game used multiple decks, or it’s an unwinnable joke.
How head 2 head is actually resolved. Whose battle hand wins, by what ranking, and whether it’s a two-player showdown or a bracket among everyone still standing.
One word is scribbled out after the “1.” on page 1, beyond recovery.
“9-11” and “Prop 8” are transcribed exactly as written. They are period jokes — 9-A-A reads as 9/11 with the Ace at 1; 8-8-8 as California’s Prop 8, hence “kills all straights.” Noted only so nobody later assumes they are a mis-reading of something else.
Source. Two sheets of college-ruled loose-leaf, photographed on a dark table: basehead-rules1.jpg and basehead-rules2.jpg. The filenames run backwards — rules2 carries the numbered steps and is page 1; rules1 carries the endgame and is page 2.
Body text is blue ballpoint. Five rules live in the margins in pencil and black ink, added after the fact — those are reproduced in the left rail above, marked ☆, exactly where they were annotating. A literal line-by-line transcription, preserving strikethroughs and the writer’s own slips, is kept alongside the photos.