Where the game came from, and how it got written down

A friend of mine (let's call him Otto) was at UMass Amherst in 1993, and he invited me to move up there and share an apartment he'd found. He didn't mention it was a one-bedroom and I was too happy to be moving somewhere new to ask. You know who else he didn't tell? Gus, the other guy he invited. Within a couple of months we welcomed my oldest friend Herb. Four doofuses, one bedroom, just mattresses on the floor. (We counted Gus's sleeping bag as a mattress.) It was awful and great, the way college-adjacent apartments are supposed to be.

I think we were at Antonio's on North Pleasant Street when Otto told us about a game he wanted to show us. Is Antonio's still there? Yeah it is! I just looked it up. That's cool. That pizza was yummy as hell. I wonder if it still is.^*

So Otto taught the apartment this game in 1993 and the roomies played the ever-loving hell out of it. It might have doubled our spending on snacks.

Let's back up, though. There are a bunch of counting games that use a regular deck of cards. The ones above Bong Hit 99 on the family tree are older than anyone can prove, a North American folk thing that probably goes back to the middle of the last century and never really made it into the card game books. One of those was going around UMass Amherst too, and it would be weird if that one and this one weren't related. Most of them are the same ideas worked out on different cards, and nobody can say which one came first. But I can tell you that Bong Hit 99 did not.^**

Here is what I do know. The roomies went back to the apartment from Antonio's and Otto showed us the game. He called it 99. That's all it was called. He remembered most of the rules. We played it on the floor, because that's where we kept our stuff and the cards were among our stuff, and we… didn't have a table. In the middle of the floor sat Uncle Danny. Uncle Danny was a coconut. Somebody carved him into a chimp with his belly open, which made him an ashtray. He was named for my actual uncle, who owned him as a young man. I liberated him from my grandparents' attic. Uncle Danny witnessed the first hands we played, and then a bunch more.

The game was already mostly formed when it arrived, Ace of Clubs and all. What we did, over that year, was add to it. We added the slide off the Ace, to the King and down through the Clubs, so thieves could steal from thieves. We added the bonus hit because, like, more bong hits. The stuff we added ended up being some of my favorite things in the game. After a hand was over, there was intrigue.

We also added Loading Duty and a hat you had to wear to remind everybody who had Loading Duty. It was a silly hat. I don't know what happened to it - maybe Uncle Danny's wearing it on a beach somewhere.

Before I left Amherst I made myself a promise: I would spread this game as far and wide as my circumstances allowed. That promise is the reason for this website and all the words and stuff on it.

Then I moved. Then I moved again. Then I moved again. Then I moved again and again and more agains. In most of those places I taught the game to somebody or somebodies. I won and lost bong hits with dozens, maybe a hundred (?) people. I played two-player with girlfriends, one of whom I've since married. That's Mary Jane, and we usually play on Valentine's Day.

But I never wrote the game down.

For most of the last 30+ years, the game lived in people's heads, and mostly in mine. That was fine as long as there was always a new room and a bong (or a bowl or whatever). Then I got older. There were fewer rooms and fewer new faces. The self-promise - spread this super fun game far and wide - wasn't really working out anymore.

So I decided to make a demo you can play in a browser, a rules document you can print for free, and a website to keep those things on. That's how I'm putting Bong Hit 99 in front of new people now.

I promised to spread this game as far as circumstances allowed. Circumstances allow a lot more than they used to.

Thanks for reading all this stuff.

-Bud