Gambling Game

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Any game can be used for gambling. Just slap a bet on an outcome. This trope is not games that require doing that to gamble. This trope is games that have gambling baked into the game mechanics.

Examples of Gambling Game include:

Literature

• Dragon Poker, from the MythAdventures novel Little Myth Marker, appears to be a cross between standard poker and the fictional "Fizzbin" from Star Trek: The Original Series. In the games described in the book, it was always played for a table stake.

Tabletop Games

• Some versions of Magic: The Gathering:
  • the original official default way of playing the game was called Ante. In Ante at the start of the game players would put a random card from their deck on the table, and the winner of the game would keep the ante cards. There are a handful of cards that interact with the Ante mechanic and must be removed from the deck prior to playing a non-Ante game. Ante proved wildly unpopular resulting in non-Ante becoming the official default way of playing and WotC stopped printing Ante Cards. In fact, you cannot run an Ante Sanctioned Event. Even so, official Ante rules do exist. As they currently stand "each player puts one random card from their deck into the ante zone after determining which player goes first but before players draw any cards. Cards in the ante zone may be examined by any player at any time. At the end of the game, the winner becomes the owner of all the cards in the ante zone."
  • The format Grandmaster was playing a starter deck trimmed from 60 cards down to 40 cards. Where the gambling comes in is this would be played in a tournament. And the winner of a match would get his/her opponents deck and be able to use those cards during the rest of the tournament. Normally it was 8 players. After the first match, the remaining players would have a 60 card minimum. The getting opponent's cards even occurred in the finals of the tournament. The prize was getting everyone's cards! Mini Masters was initially a variant of Grandmaster and the get your opponents cards rule was one of the things that carried over (initially at least, Mini Masters changed over time).
• Probably the most famous example of a Gambling Game is Poker.
• The jewish game Dreidel (although by some definitions this might not count as a game do to how little agency players have).

Web Original

• Vigor Mortis has the game King’s Dominance.