Kuhn Khan and Cooncan: an update

Ifirst wrote a piece about Kuhn Khan in 2018 after I had acquired a number of boxed sets produced by Goodall & Son and found that little was known about the game under this assumed name. I speculated at the time that Kuhn Khan was a renamed version of the rather better known game originating on the other side of the Atlantic called Cooncan, endeavouring to give it “a more exotic flavour”. It now appears, after further research, that I was absolutely right! Cooncan and Kuhn Khan are pretty much exactly the same rummy-style game, but packaged and presented differently by the two main card-producing companies of the early 20th Century, Goodall & Son and De La Rue.

Origins

According to the doyen of late Victorian card game writing, R. F. Foster, the game Cooncan was mispronounced and evolved from a much older Mexican game which became popular in the South West of the USA in the early and mid-19th century called “Conquian”1. Writing an introduction to his book on the game in 1912 he claimed that although popular, no published rules on the game existed before his own account in “Foster’s Hoyle” published by the F.

A. Stokes Company in 1897. “Since then,” he argues, “a number of newspaper articles have described it and it is now to be found in all the standard books on card games as one of the best for two players”.

The original game for two was played with 40 cards, from which the eights, nines and tens were missing. Foster claimed to have originated the idea of removing the kings, queens and jacks instead. However, by the turn of the 20th century the game had evolved further for three or four players using the whole pack and “gradually getting known under the name of rum, or rummy”

until, on 10th September, 1911, a description of this variation of the game appeared in the New York Sun newspaper and “shortly afterwards the U.S. Playing Card Co. of Cincinnati issued a brief set of rules for the game, still calling it rum”.

Foster goes on to argue that several English papers reproduced the NY Sun article in full, causing it to be enthusiastically taken up by English card players so that “in 1912 we find them playing it with two packs and two jokers, the Bath Club in London having printed a set of rules governing the game in that form”. ^[1] whom?” ^[2] York, 1912 At this point, it seems appropriate to note that Foster was absolutely right about the “sudden” English enthusiasm for this “new” game. This is reflected in the speed with which the Bath Club produced a set of Rules published by De La Rue in 1912 and Goodall & Son produced their own version of the game

under the name “Kuhn Khan” in the same year. The Rivalry Here I reproduce the cover of Fosters 85-page booklet on the game and how it is best played by 2 to 5 players, together with the cover of the 1912 Bath rules and Goodall’s Kuhn Khan by an unknown author writing under the name “Nemo”.

Above: The Bath Club Rules for Cooncan, published by De La Rue in 1912.

Above: Goodall & Son’s Kuhn Khan booklet, written by the unidentified author using the name Nemo, 1912.

Above: An opened Kuhn Khan set containing the booklet, scoring block, cards and promotional material.

Above: Pages from Goodall’s Kuhn Khan booklet, alongside an advertisement for Goodall’s Imperial Playing Cards.

The Foster booklet, although published in the USA, has an introduction written from the Savage Club, London, in December 1912 and is clearly directed at a British as well as an American audience. The Bath Rules from De La Rue are also dated 1912 as is the first edition of “Nemo’s” Kuhn Khan. A subsequent edition of the latter, dated 1913, adds the phrase on the title page “incorporating FOSTER’s Latest American Popular Innovation”. This leaves us in no doubt that this is the same game, whatever name is used to identify it.

The Game

The game is straightforward and relatively simple to describe and play and its basic format will be very familiar to most card players today. However, there are nuanced differences in the presentation of these simple rules, not least because this was seen by some essentially as a gambling game so it was important to get straight how the stakes were calculated and how they were to be settled at the close of play. Foster’s descriptions are primarily concerned with how the game is best played with different numbers of players3, but say nothing about the financial arrangements which may be involved. The Bath Rules offer a basic outline of the game, and specifies the normal stakes involved when playing with Club rules, while Nemo goes into much greater

detail over how gambling stakes are settled at the close of play. ^[3] and two players. In the case of the 2-person game, he recommends using one pack of only 40 cards.

By 1912, the standard version of the game uses two identical packs of 52 cards, plus two jokers, shuffled together. The dealer deals ten cards face down to each player placing the unused cards face down in the middle of the table, but turning the top card face up at its side . Each player in turn decides whether “his” hand is best improved by taking the upturned card, or the unknown next card from the top of the closed pack. A players “go” ends when one card from his hand, now of 11 cards, is discarded on the face-up pile.

The aim of the game is for a player to get rid of all of “his” cards by creating “sequences in the same suit” or “melds of cards of the same number”, leaving always one to discard to the face-up pile. The sequences can be, say, 6,7 and 8 of clubs. It can be more but not less than three. Aces can be high (A, K, Q etc) or low (A, 2, 3 etc.) A player may finish the game in a single move by playing, say, three 10s, three Queens and a sequence of 5, 6, 7 and 8 of hearts, placing his eleventh card on the discard pile. Foster alone calls this “a Splash” and, in his version of the game, this entitles the player to a bonus of 25 or 50 points (by prior agreement presumably) in addition to the pips calculated from the “losers”

remaining cards. Alternately, a player may place a meld or sequence on the table as part of his “go”, discarding one card and retaining a smaller number of cards in hand hoping to “go out” on a subsequent turn. The joker may be used to represent any other card in a meld or sequence.

Above: A linen-covered Cooncan box from the early period of the game’s promotion.

Above: An elaborate green Cooncan set, opened to show two packs, the card compartments and a scoring block.

Above: A closed green box from one of the early Cooncan or Kuhn Khan sets, with gold lettering and a central clasp.

Above: An opened boxed set showing the cards, scoring block and accompanying Cooncan and Kuhn Khan booklets.

In Foster’s description of the game, and in the Bath rules, any player can at any time place a meld or sequence on the table as part of their go. In Kuhn Khan, this process is called “ratting” and requires the player to have at least 70 “pips” represented in the cards “ratted” or at least 7 cards placed at the same time. In all three versions of the game the pips count is as follows: Joker counts 15; each Ace counts 11; Court cards count 10 each and remaining cards count as their face value. This system of calculation is used to assess winnings and losses at the end of the game or games played.

Once a player has placed a meld or sequence on the table, it can be added to by any other player as part of their go. A joker cannot be replaced from a meld or the middle of a sequence. However, if the joker is at the end of a sequence e.g. J(6), 7, 8 it can be moved by another player to become 7, 8, J(9) if the player wishes to add a 10. But this move can only be done once, after that, the Joker stays where it is.

When a player goes out the game ends and the other players count the “pips” on any remaining cards in hand and these are added to the winner’s score to be settled at the close of play. The scoring chart provided makes it possible to score both the positive and negative scores achieved so that at the end of play the positive should equal the negatives (for checking purposes) and ^[4] appropriate payments are made to the player or players with an overall positive score.

It is left to Nemo in “Kuhn Khan” to propose how “pips” can be converted into points which, in turn, translate into money. He proposes that every 10 pips add up to one point. If there is an odd number of pips, up to 4 is disregarded while 5 – 9 is counted as one point. It is presumed in all cases that the stake per point has been agreed in advance. In the case of the Bath Club, “points are threepence, and the maximum one shilling per point; the pool, if any, shall be limited to twenty points”.

Inside the front cover of De La Rue’s Bath Rules is this advertisement for the ‘New Game (sic) of “Cooncan”.’

Above: A closed black Cooncan box with a decorative clasp.

It offers “a wide variety” of boxed sets at a range of prices, “from” 5/- and 10/-. I have a single example of a linen-covered card box which, I am sure, would have been at the modest end of the price range available.

As advertised it contains two packs of cards, one remaining of the two scoring blocks and a copy of the DLR Bath Rules, 6th edition, 1913.

But some DLR sets were much more exotic and costly in leather with silver fittings. Here are two examples I have discovered recently but which sadly I do not own.

It is evident from the font on the lids of these three boxes that they are all from the same source, namely De La Rue.

I have not reproduced here the equivalent sets produced by Goodall and son which can be seen elsewhere on this site.5 It is evident from the speed with which these items were produced, and the quality of some of the boxed sets made available, that Cooncan (for De La Rue) and Kuhn Khan (for Goodall & Son) were regarded by both as “the next big thing”, in card games at the time. It also seems likely that this was a short- lived enthusiasm. Certainly, it appears that even before Goodall & Son was taken over by De La Rue in 1922, Kuhn Khan was no longer being promoted.

It was dropped from the list of Goodall’s Handbooks of Card Games in other Goodall pocket guides as early as 1919. I can also find little evidence that De La Rue’s own version, Cooncan, continued for long. I have been unable to find ^[5] any advertisements for the game beyond the early 1920s when various forms of Bridge, Bezique and Piquet seem to have become the main card games of choice.