President / Asshole / Scum

👥 3–10 players 📍 Indoor📍 Anywhere ⚡ Calm 🧩 Moderate ⏱ 20-45 minutes 🎂 Ages 6+

Quick Pitch

President is a shedding card game where you race to empty your hand first — the first player out becomes President (with all the seat advantages that come with it), and the last player out becomes the Asshole, who has to give away their two best cards to the President before the next round even starts.

Hook

Each round, players take turns playing a card (or group of cards of the same rank) that beats whatever was played before it. If you can't or don't want to beat it, you pass. When everyone passes, the last player to play starts fresh with anything they want. The goal is simple — get rid of all your cards first — but the mandatory card trade between rounds means your position snowballs: good players get better cards, the person at the bottom keeps starting from a hole.

Equipment Needed

  • One standard 52-card deck
  • Paper and pencil for optional score tracking

Setup

  1. Shuffle and deal all cards roughly equally (some players get one extra card)
  2. Player with 3♣ plays first
  3. Determine player order based on previous hand (President in best seat, Asshole in worst)

Rules

Objective

Be the first to empty your hand, earning higher rank. Continue playing until all players empty hands. Higher-ranked players have advantages in seating and card management next round.

Card Rankings

  • Ace: Highest
  • King, Queen, Jack: Face cards
  • 10-2: Number value
  • 2: Lowest

Gameplay

  1. Starting play: Player with 3♣ (or agreed starting card) plays any number of cards of same rank
  2. Matching ranks: Next player must play same rank but higher value, OR pass
    • Example: If 3s played, next player must play 3s of higher suit rank, or pass
  3. Pass: Player may pass; play passes to next player
  4. Beating cards: Each card played must be higher than the last in the run
  5. Round end: When all players pass or cannot play, the player who played last card wins the trick
  6. Next round: Winning player plays next; plays any number of cards of same rank
  7. Hands empty: Players sitting out once they run out of cards; continue play until all are eliminated

Special cards:

  • Twos: Can be played on anything (powerful)
  • Tens: Can clear the table if played (some variants)

Player Rankings

After all players empty their hands:

  • First out: President (best seat, deals cards next round, can trade cards down with Asshole)
  • Second out: Vice President
  • Third through Second-to-Last: Middle ranks
  • Last out: Asshole (worst seat, must deal next round, trade worst cards with President)

Trade rule: President and Asshole exchange cards:

  • President discards 2 worst cards; Asshole discards 2 best cards; they swap

Scoring (Optional)

  • If tracking points: Assign points based on position (1st place = 4 points, 2nd = 3 points, etc.)
  • First to agreed total wins overall game

Expert Player

Tips

  1. Card management: Save powerful cards (Aces, high face cards) for critical moments
  2. Tanking: Intentionally losing to avoid being President (depends on playgroup humor)
  3. Pass timing: Know when to pass vs. when to beat a card
  4. Table awareness: Remember which cards have been played
  5. Rank advantage: If President, play strategically in first hand to build lead
  6. Asshole burden: If Asshole, trade for best cards possible; play conservatively

Variations

  • Scum variant: Named positions (King, Prince, Peasant, Scum)
  • Capitalism: Communist/Capitalist socioeconomic theme
  • Dai Hin Min: Chinese variant with different ranking rules
  • Suit rank: Spades > Hearts > Diamonds > Clubs (adds complexity)
  • Clear rule: 10s or other cards can clear the table
Learn More — History & Origins

History & Origins

President's origins are genuinely unclear, but the game structure — players shedding cards competitively while earning social rank for placement — appears independently in several cultures. The Japanese game Daifugō (大富豪, "Grand Millionaire") is the best-documented early version, with evidence of play in Japan from at least the 1970s, and the Chinese game Sheng Ji shares similar mechanics. The American "President" version spread through college campuses in the 1980s and 1990s largely through informal teaching, acquiring increasingly irreverent names (Asshole, Scum) as it traveled. The game's appeal in college settings was partly about the card mechanics and partly about the social permission it gave players to treat each other with mock contempt within a clearly bounded game context.

Cultural Context

What distinguishes President from other shedding games is the card trade — the mandatory exchange of best-for-worst cards between the top and bottom finishers before each new round. This mechanic gives the game an explicitly social dimension: it encodes inequality directly into the rules, rewarding past success and penalizing past failure in a way that either accelerates competence or just gets funny and absurd as one player runs away with it. The game has been called a simulation of capitalism (hence the variant name "Capitalism"), though most players are too busy arguing about house rules to notice. The many regional variants — different special cards, different numbers of cards traded, whether the President sits first or last — mean that almost every group that plays President plays a slightly different version, and agreeing on the rules before you start is half the game.

See Also