Three-Dragon Ante
A card game popular throughout Faerûn at all levels of society. It's played with a colorful deck of cards featuring images of dragons.
Copper dragons or three-copper (among peasants); golds or plats (among adventurers and aristocrats).
The dedicated deck of Three-Dragon Ante consists of eighty cards. Of those, seventy are standard dragon cards, divided in ten suits of seven cards, each representing one type of chromatic or metallic dragon. The remaining ten cards depicted other types of creatures, which included stronger dragon cards, draconic deities such as Bahamut and Tiamat, and non-draconic creatures, collectively called "mortals" in the game. The many existing variants of the game mainly differed in the choice of those additional cards.
A standard Three-Dragon Ante deck typically sells for 1 gp.
The game consists of rounds called "gambits" that involve betting and building sets of cards that competed with one another.
- Ante. The first phase of the gambit is a round of betting, or "ante", when players place bets determined by random card draws on the stakes at the center of the table.
- Flight. In the second phase, players take turns placing cards in front of them to form "flights".
At the end of three gambits, the player with the strongest flight collects the stakes.
In addition, certain cards granted special moves whose effects could shape a single play or the dynamics of the entire gambit.
Maybe 20-30 minutes, tops.
Three-Dragon Ante is popular across all social classes.
Just about everybody. The main difference is the type of currency employed in the ante: peasants and farmers usually played for copper pieces, while merchants and artisans favored betting silver, and adventurers typically played with gold or even platinum.
It's popular throughout Faerûn.
