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Kings is a luck-based card game from New Guinea. It plays similarly to a fishing game, only there are no decisions to be made.
The description below is based upon Laycock (1966, p. 52–3).
#Play
The game is played with a standard 52-card deck.
To begin, the four are removed and set aside. These cards are not used for playing but as scoring tokens.
The dealer shuffles the remaining 48 cards and deals four cards face up to a pool in the centre. If any of them can be paired (by rank) the dealer captures these and deals replacements, and does this until there are no pairs in the centre. The rest of the deck is placed face-down next to the pool to form a stock.
Each player then takes their turn in the following way: they turn up two more cards from the stock and add them to the pool. If there are any pairs they capture them, and then play passes to the next player.
Once all the cards have been played (and thus captured), the player with the most captured cards wins a . If there is a tie between players then a single round of Laki can be played to determine who gets the .
The cards (aside from the s) are then collected and shuffled and the game is played again, until all the s have been claimed. The player with the most s is the winner. Again, if there is a tie between players then a single round of Laki can be played to determine the overall winner.
#Thothit Yogyakarta
A very similar game but played with Ceki cards is known in Yogyakarta as ThothitOlder Romanizations spell this Ṭoṭit. (there is also a different game which was called Thothit in Surakarta; see that article for details).
According to Javaanse Kaartspelen: bijdrage tot de beschrijving van land en volk [Javanese Card Games] (p. 75), the game is usually played by women.
Three players play with a kepala of 60 ceki cards, so that there are two identical copies of each card.
To decide the starting player, one player draws a card at random, then counts around the circle anti-clockwise starting from themselves (so that a , , or indicates that they are the starting player).
The cards are shuffled and placed face-down in a pile to form the stock.
Beginning with the starting player, each player draws a card from the stock and tries to match any other cards in the pool by rank. All and honour cards are considered to be of the same rank. If there is a matching card then they player captures both cards and places them in front of themselves. If there is no matching card then the player places the drawn card face-up as part of the pool.
Once all the cards have been played (and thus all cards captured), the players total up their points. Two identical matching cards are worth 10 points, and each red-stamped card is also worth an additional 10 points. The player with the highest score wins, takes any payment from the others, and then becomes the starting player for the next round.
#Thit-Thit-Dulit
Thit-Thit-Dulit is an even simpler version of the game for two players, again played in Yogyakarta with a deck of 60 ceki cards.
In this version of the game, a card can only capture if it matches by both suit and rank; it must match its identical partner.
#References
Laycock, D. C. (). ‘Three Native Card Games of New Guinea and Their European Ancestors’. Oceania vol. 37 (1): pages 49–53.
Siem, Tjan Tjoe [曾祖沁] (). Javaanse Kaartspelen: bijdrage tot de beschrijving van land en volk [Javanese Card Games]; Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen volume 75. A. C. Nix & Co.: Bandung, West Java, Indonesia.