Thirteen

No, I'm not going to mention anything more about Apollo 13, but it makes a good "13" graphic to open this entry.

When I was in high school I lived in Garden Grove, California. I don't know how many of y'all know, but the largest settlement of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam is located in Orange County, California, i.e. the Little Saigon area. Many of the students in my high school (and most of the other honors students) were Vietnamese. I had horribly cruel parents (;-)) who would buy me a car or pick me up every day. :-) Therefore, I had to ride the bus home (school was over two and a half miles away so walking with my heavy backpack wasn't a real option). While waiting for the bus I would oftentimes play card games with some friends--somebody always had a deck. The most popular game was thirteen.

I tried to teach the game to a couple of my nephews a few weeks ago, but I couldn't remember all of the rules! (It is similar to Kahuna so I was getting some things mixed up.) Then I performed a Google search and finally found this site. Apparently the game is also known as Tien Len--but it is the thirteen that I remember.

Tien Len can be considered the national card game of Vietnam; the name of the game, which should properly be spelt , means Go Forward. The main description on this page is based on information from Jona Baily; Kenneth Lu has contributed a slightly different version. Probably as a result of the Vietnam war, Tien Len has spread to some parts of the USA, where it is sometimes called Viet Cong or just VC; Kelly Aman has contributed one version of this. Chris Hovanic learned another version from Chris Molinaro (also in the USA) and they call it Thirteen.

Tien Len is a climbing game (a bit like Zheng Shangyou or President), in which the aim is to get rid of your cards as soon as possible by beating combinations of cards played by the other players.

Four players normally play with all fifty-two cards dealt out amongst them. The order of suits (from lowest to highest) is spades, clubs, diamonds, hearts--cards go in standard numerical order except that a two is at the top. The two of hearts trumps anything (well you can only play a single card on other single cards--a two can't trump a run) but can be "broken" by a two-breaker (four of a kind or three pairs in a row). But anyway, it was great to be able to find the rules to this game after so long of not playing it. I thought that I would share the site here in hopes that others might be interested enough to play. It is a very fun game--quite simple. You can keep score if you want, but that isn't really necessary.

~Matt