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Mmmm. Bugs. You can’t eat just one.
Welcome to the world of Renfield, where gravediggers and other foul miscreants spend their spare time playing an unusually cruel 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 was one of the original Cheapass Games, first released in 1998 as CAG 019. This version has the same art as the original, but tinted to make the suits easier to distinguish.
The Renfield deck has three suits of eighteen cards each. The lowest of these cards, rank zero, are held out of play, and are 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 six tricks are played (by fairly standard trick-taking rules) in which players pay the pot for each trick they take.
The goal for each hand is to take the fewest bugs (points) but with a caveat: You must take at least one! Until you have at least one bug, you’re not even allowed to fold.
Links:
Renfield Rules (PDF, 8/8/2026)
Renfield Printable Deck (PDF, 8/8/2026)
Original Edition PDF (In our Shop)
Learn more about Renfield at its product page.
