What is Kimp - the card game?

Question

The rules?

How to play?

Can you play with just any cards or are there certain ones?

Answer 1

Kemps (or Twa, Kent, Squares, and many other names) is an excellent team-based card game that I used to play with my friends back in high school. The full rule set can be found here, but the gist is that you try to form a 4 of a kind, then get your partner to say "Kemps" by using some predetermined signal before an opposing team calls "Unkemps" on you.

Now, the obvious problem is that you need an even number of players to play Kemps... until now!

One night, well after we had all finished college, my old friends from high school and I reunited for a game of Kemps. Then a fifth man showed up. You would think our fun was over at that point - but we were college graduates now. My friend Rich had an ingenious idea: what if we each had 2 partners?

Putting our finely-tuned college educations to work, we spent the next couple of minutes ironing out a series of rules to make this work. The fruits of our efforts turned out to be the most intense, brilliant, and strategic card game anyone ever invented or possibly could invent.

That's right: Kemps-5 is the best card game in the known AND unknown Universe.

Rules

Kemps-5 is based on Kemps, so most of the standard Kemps rules apply. The following discussion assumes that you have a basic knowledge of standard Kemps (you can find a discussion of the rules here).

Your goal is still to form a 4 of a kind, then get your partner to say "Kemps" without the opposing team calling "Unkemps" on you. The difference in Kemps-5 is that you have 2 partners, so either one can call Kemps. If your partner correctly calls Kemps when you have 4 of a kind, both you and that partner will receive a point - your other partner will receive nothing. (This game really only makes sense when you play multiple games and keep score - see the "Scoring" section).