Archived Thread: The Saint Petersburg Winning Streak
SYSOP POST · FROM: HEXBARON · DATE: [not logged]
During an internship, a few of us fell into playing Saint Petersburg most lunch breaks, and some evenings we kept the table going for a while after work finished too. One stretch of that turned into a running joke: I won three games in a row across two days, and it thoroughly annoyed everyone else at the table.
I defended the streak at the time by arguing that Saint Petersburg has a first-player advantage — worth being clear that this was my argument in the moment, not a settled fact about the game, especially since I'd actually played second in two of those three wins.
On the second day, my coworkers insisted we use rock-paper-scissors to decide seats before the game even started. I never really saw the point, since we still used rock-paper-scissors afterward to decide who went first anyway. In the five-player game that followed, I drew fourth in turn order — which felt like a disastrous seat to open from — but recovered to win again, this time by a smaller margin over second place than in the earlier games.
That afternoon, the coworker sitting opposite me told me, half-joking, that they didn't want to hear me talk anymore — not out of any real annoyance, just the running gag of the streak catching up with them.
The other recurring bit of table business, streak or no streak, was what to do about a regretted card purchase: someone would buy a card, immediately want out of it, and try to hand it to another player instead. Whoever hadn't been affected by the mistake usually had an opinion about whether that should be allowed at all. We never reached a final agreement on it — the negotiation itself, argued out fresh most lunchtimes, was the part worth remembering.
SYSOP NOTE: No fixed rule ever came out of the card-transfer argument. It's filed here as a memory of the discussion, not a ruling — see the Rules Archive's proposed table protocol for one way a group could agree to settle this before a game starts, which is not the same as claiming this group ever did.