hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2172.txt

Episode: 2172
Title: HPR2172: Dutch Blitz Table Top Game
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2172/hpr2172.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 15:15:43

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This is HPR Episode 2172 entitled Dutch Blitz Tabletop Game.
It is hosted by SteamSaner and is about 26 minutes long.
The summary is Steam describes the game of Dutch Blitz.
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Hello hacker public radio my name is Steve.
Like many of you I have been listening with interest to the series on tabletop gaming that Clot 2 has been doing.
It's been interesting to me because I did grow up playing quite a few games with the family, both the immediate family and extended family and also in various social functions.
So it's kind of interesting some of the perspectives that Clot 2 has given in how he is kind of being introduced to tabletop gaming.
The most recent episode on SkipBo was kind of interesting because that is actually a game that I have played before a few times.
And it got me to thinking a little bit about some of the games that I used to play growing up.
And one in particular kind of stands out as being a favorite but also unique enough that perhaps not everybody here has heard about that.
And the name of that game is Dutch Blitz.
Now unlike SkipBo, one of Clot 2's kind of critiques of SkipBo is that there was no theme whatsoever, I mean just generic cards.
Dutch Blitz does have a theme to it, at least in terms of the design of the cards and the box and everything that you get.
The theme doesn't necessarily relate too much to the gameplay but there is something there.
So Dutch Blitz was created as I understand it in about 1959 by a guy in the name of Werner Ernst George Mueller.
And he was from Pennsylvania in the United States.
Now the game is similar to a game called Nerds which is played with standard playing cards.
And I understand that Nerds had been around since the 1940s.
And it's not totally clear to me to what extent Mr. Mueller was influenced by that game.
It very possibly was.
Although another website I found said that he was an optometrist and it said that he thought that the game that he created might be useful in helping his children learn about colors and numbers.
Well the game spread quite rapidly in the Eastern Pennsylvania area.
And the culture that this game was created in is something called Pennsylvania Dutch.
And the Pennsylvania Dutch is made up of early German immigrants that immigrated to the United States as early as the late 1700s I believe through like the late 1800s.
Something somewhere in that time frame.
And a lot of them moved to the Eastern Pennsylvania area in the United States.
Now Dutch is a little bit of a misnomer.
A lot of times you might think of Dutch as the people from Holland or the Netherlands.
From what I understand Dutch in the sense of Pennsylvania Dutch is actually a corruption of the word Deutsche, which of course is German.
And so they didn't come from the Netherlands area.
They came from parts of Germany and of course the United States has a lot of immigrants that came from German areas and other European areas there.
And my family actually has roots in that kind of culture as well.
Not exactly Pennsylvania Dutch.
My family were among the menonites that immigrated to various places in the United States.
In my case they came to the central Kansas area.
And of course menonite is a Protestant Christian faith.
And many of those immigrants came over because they felt like they were being persecuted for their faith.
And so that's my history as well.
So the design of this game has kind of symbols and concepts and terminology that is in line with that culture.
It tends to be agricultural in nature and it does tend to have a strong Christian faith built into it as well.
A lot of people have heard of the Amish or of like old order type conservative groups.
That's the type of groups that we're talking about here.
And so one of the things that's sort of interesting and perhaps one of the reasons that he came up with this game is in those cultures it was very taboo
to use standard playing cards.
Basically playing cards represented to them represented gambling and gambling was considered to be a bad thing.
And so it was very taboo to play games with standard playing cards.
And so one of the things that Mr. Mueller may have done is he may have learned about this game called Nerds and then built his own version of it using his own cards design that would be more palatable to the people of that culture.
Now this game became very popular in that area and then it also spread then to many of the other similar you know German immigration immigrant cultures throughout the United States.
And it was a game that I don't know kind of could be associated with you know our heritage into a certain extent.
And growing up it was something that was played quite frequently at various kinds of church functions and retreats and so on.
And my mom in particular loved the game. She played it with her women friends a lot.
But it wasn't you know only the women that played it and men would too on occasion as well.
So anyways let me go ahead and describe what what the game kind of looks like and how it how it's set up.
The standard set has four decks of cards and each player gets its gets their own deck so it can accommodate two to four players.
I understand there's an extension pack that you can get that adds four more decks so that would support up to eight players however I have never played with more than four.
Each deck has 40 cards in it and those cards are made up of numbers from one through ten in four different colors.
Now the colors are sort of analogous to the suits that you're familiar with on playing cards.
So you got four colors one through ten in each color and those colors are red, blue, green and yellow.
Now additionally the red and blue cards have a picture of a boy on them actually on each corner all four corners of the card.
There's a little picture of a boy and it kind of looks like a little Amish boy if that means anything to you.
And the red and blue cards have the boy the green and yellow cards have a little girl a little girl in a bonnet and a dress kind of an kind of an Amish girl look to it.
And those are sort of analogous to you know the red cards versus the black cards in the standard planes that standard deck of cards.
Now each of these four decks are identical in terms of the face of the cards the colors and the numbers and all of that.
They are differentiated however on the back of each card in each deck there is a symbol to differentiate one deck from another and those symbols are as follows.
One deck has blue plows and by plow I mean like the old horse drawn plow that kind of a shape.
Another deck has green pumps and by pump I mean like a hand water pump water well pump.
Another set another deck has a red colored buggy like a horse drawn buggy and then the fourth one is a yellow bucket like a wooden bucket that would be used to carry water.
So you can see you know the images from the time and the culture and the history in which this game was created.
Otherwise you know the colors are very bright the face of the cards are very bright colors the font of the numbers is sort of a I don't know I would call it kind of a gothic type of a font which I don't know if that's really related to the culture in which this game was was done but nonetheless it kind of has an old feel to it I guess or something like that.
And then the middle of the card is sort of just a design pattern that is kind of kind of a quilt patch looking pattern which of course is also indicative of that culture in which the game was created.
So each player gets their own deck of card either pump buggy plow or bucket.
To start the game or to be to set up the game you have to form a number of piles and again the names of these piles sort of are thematic in a way as well.
First of all what you do is each player shuffles their own deck and you're supposed to shuffle it you know quite well.
You hold the deck then with the card faces down so you don't know what cards you're you're you're dealing and you deal for yourself 10 cards in front of you 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 and then you flip that whole stack over.
So you can now see the top most face card in that in that stack that is called your blitz pile.
And one of the goals of the game is to get rid of your blitz pile get rid of those 10 cards.
So once you have the blitz pile you then deal three more cards one after another and flip them right side up face up and you set them in three piles if you will to the left of the blitz pile.
So you've got a pile of 10 cards which is the blitz pile so the left of that are three more cards in a row and these are what are referred to as the post piles and I'll get to what those are used for in just a little bit.
So then you have the rest of your deck in your hand.
Now as when gameplay starts what you do is whether it's kind of complicated how to explain it but so any player that has a playable card that is a 1.
The number 1 of any color and by playable cards I mean the top card on any of your post piles or the top card on your blitz pile is playable as well as as you are playing the game.
Let me back up a second as you're playing the game you're going to rotate through your deck by taking three cards upside down you say they're still upside down face down you take three cards and then flip them over and you set them on a pile that's called your wood pile.
And so the top card that is showing there as well as the top card of the three post piles and the top card of the blitz pile any of those are playable.
If you don't have any playable card you take three more cards off of your deck flip them over and put them on top of the wood pile and just keep doing that.
When you get to the end of your deck you take that wood pile flip it upside down again and then start doing it again three cards flip three cards flip until you have a card that is playable.
Now if you've ever played various versions of the game solitaire with regular playing cards all of this is going to sound quite familiar because it is almost the same mechanic as like several different solitaire games like Klondike and several others.
You shuffle through your deck flipping three cards flip them over until you have a card that you can play. Now how do you play what how do you play the cards well one of the things that you want to do is play cards out in the middle of the table on piles that are called Dutch piles.
As I started to say earlier as soon as a player has a number one card of any color they can play that card out in the middle of the table and start what is called a Dutch pile.
And then additional cards can be added to those Dutch piles in sequential orders and sequential order and maintaining the same color.
So if I put out a yellow one I can then play a yellow two on top of that and then a yellow three and a yellow four and so on all the way up to ten.
And again that's similar to solitaire games as well. Now the Dutch piles however are communal any player can play on any other Dutch pile.
So if I put out a one a yellow one and somebody else has a yellow two they can play on that pile it's not my pile per second.
So that's one of the things I one of the ways I can play a card. Another way I can play a card is on the post piles the three post piles I can we we kind of call it build down so if and again this is similar to solitaire so if one of my piles one of my post piles has say a five on it I can then play a four.
And then a three and then a two and I can kind of build that pile down if I want to now that you have to go in decreasing number so five four three two one but you also have to alternate boy girl.
So if I have say a five blue a blue five which is a boy card I can play a four on it but it would have to be either a green or a yellow which is a girl card and then on top of that I could put like a red or blue I boy three and then so on.
And part of the whole point of those piles is just to kind of be able to sort through things it gives you a mechanism by which you can kind of you know shuffle cards around.
Now if you can play your one of the top most card of your blitz pile then that's of primary importance you want to play that card and you can play that card by either putting it on a Dutch pile out in the middle of the table or you can play it on one of the post piles.
And that's a way to get a card off of the blitz piles to move it over to the to the post piles so one of the things one of the strategies is say I have you know a green six on my blitz pile and I can't play it anywhere yet but I noticed that I have say a yellow eight on one of my post piles.
If I can find like a red seven that I can put on there then I can move my green six over to over to the what was it red or blue seven.
And so I'm building down my post piles I'm alternating boy and girl and that's one of the ways I can get rid of cards on my blitz pile.
If I can't do any of that kind of action then I just keep shuffling through my deck and adding to the wood pile and then hopefully a card comes up that I can then play either on a Dutch pile on a or on a post pile to help me get rid of my my 10 cards in the blitz pile.
That's basically the mechanic now here's what's really interesting about the game and what makes it fun all so far all this would really be as a solitaire game you know four players all playing the same solitaire game but what makes it fun is that you don't take turns.
Everybody is doing what I just described at the same time as fast as they can and so you know once you get your you know your pile set up you're ready to go somebody says go and everybody starts going and you know you're shuffling through cards as fast as you can.
You're moving cards around you know you're moving cards to your you know your post piles trying to figure out a way to get rid of the top card on your blitz pile as soon as that one's gone now you have a completely different card and you have to figure out how to get rid of it and it's a very fast-paced game.
The fact that the Dutch piles out in the middle of the table are communal means that it very often comes up that you know two or more players have the same number of the same color of card that they can play.
And so you know they're waiting for a Dutch pile to get to the point where they can play that that card well as soon as that becomes available everybody goes to try to to try to play that card and only one of them one of them can play it whoever gets there first you know gets it everybody else they have to take their card back and continue on.
And the game goes until one player completely clears off their ten cards in the blitz pile at which point they yell out blitz and at that point all all play must stop.
So what you do then is you sort through the you know everybody sorts through all of the cards that make up the Dutch piles out in the middle of the table basically flip them all over and you sort them into their deck symbols the plow the pump the buggy the bucket.
And you know each person takes their cards that were out there and they count them up.
You then subtract two times the number of cards you have left in your blitz pile.
Of course the person that went blitz they don't have any in their blitz piles so they count their cards out in the Dutch piles and then that's their score.
Other players that still have cards there you count your cards that you got out in the Dutch pile you subtract two times what you have left in the blitz pile that's your score.
And so usually the game is played in you know many rounds and you like add up your scores as you go on so this is my score for this round.
So then we you know shuffle all the decks again start over play another round you know add up the scores and you know we used to like decide on a target like you know say 500 points or whatever and we would play until somebody has reached 500 points.
Another way you could do it is say okay we're going to play 10 rounds and whoever has the most points at the end of the 10 rounds you know might might win or there's different ways you could do that.
And I believe the instructions kind of give you some suggestions on that.
But that's really the dynamic and what make again what makes it fun is the fast pace aspect of it that you're you're racing the other players to get rid of your cards and to get as many cards out in the Dutch pile.
So I should say this you know the objective is on one hand to get rid of your blitz pile because once you do you can call blitz and you won't have any subtractor subtraction to your points.
But really the other part of the objective is to get as many cards out on the Dutch pile piles as you possibly can because that you know obviously affects your score as well.
And so there's sort of a balance there and you know it has actually a fairly good game for like I hand coordination because you know you got to kind of have a peripheral vision you got to have a view of what's going on on the Dutch piles out there.
So that as soon as something comes up that you can play a card on you know you can do that as quickly as possible.
But then you're also got to pay attention to what you got going on in front of you with your Dutch pile or your blitz pile and your post piles.
And you know as you're doing this you're shuffling through your deck three at a time and trying to come up with a number that allows you to you know shuffle things around.
And that's how it works.
So in the show notes I've put some URLs for the official Dutch blitz website as well as a Wikipedia page that kind of describes the game and a couple others as well.
Now it used to be like I said that the game was kind of hard to come by. You'd have to kind of go to certain bookstores and things like that.
Now on the internet you know it's easy to find on Amazon or eBay or you know all sorts of different places.
And while you know when I was growing up this was a very popular game you know in our little society kind of where I grew up.
And in others like it but it has spread beyond that a lot and there's a lot of people that have played it and know the game and enjoy it as well.
So I think that's my best attempt at describing the game of Dutch blitz.
I hope it was interesting to those of you that enjoy games and it might be one that you want to take a look at.
With that I will sign out for this episode and hope to hear some more about games more games from either Clot 2 or somebody else out there that has an interesting game go ahead and make an episode about it.
So for HBR this is Steve saying good day.
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