Renfield

Mmmm. Bugs. You can’t eat just one.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Renfield, where gravediggers and other foul miscreants spend their spare time playing an unusual game of cards.

During the week, these grisly fellows make their living digging up the freshly dead. So you can only imagine what kind of sordid game they might play to unwind.

Well, imagine no more.

Renfield is a classic Cheapass Game, first released in 1999 as a sequel to Parts Unknown. It is a cross between trick-taking and gambling, a rough-and-tumble slugfest of a card game that’s perfect for surly gravediggers.

The deck has three suits with 18 cards each. The lowest of these, rank zero, are typically held out of play, and used as markers to indicate the order of suits.

Players keep score with chips, and the goal is (of course) to finish with more chips than you started with. Each round, the high bidder sets the order of suits, and then seven tricks are played (by fairly standard trick-taking rules) in which players pay the pot for each trick they take.

The goal is to take the fewest bugs (points) but with a caveat: You have to take at least one. Until you have at least one bug, you’re not even allowed to fold.

The files and links for Renfield are below. This game will be available for general purchase in August 2026. If you’d like early access to our games as we publish them, consider joining our Coconut Crabs on Patreon!

In anticipation of the August release, we will likely update the rules above. These were made to accompany the 2013 DriveThru version, way back in the when. However, they don’t need much improvement aside from updates to the layout. We love this game more than it deserves.

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