Sheepshead (card game) Sheepshead (card game) Sheepshead or Sheephead is a trick-taking card game invented by Julius Meinen. It is the Americanized version of Bavaria's national card game, Schafkopf, albeit the latter is played with Bavarian-pattern cards unlike its American descendant. Sheepshead is most commonly played by five players, but variants exist to allow for two to eight players. There are also many other variants to the game rules, and many slang terms used with the game. Schafkopf literally means "sheep's head" and may refer to the practice going back over a century of recording the score by drawing a stylised head of
Faro (card game) also often cheat as well. In a fair game the house's edge was low, so bankers increasingly resorted to cheating the players to increase the profitability of the game for the house. This too was acknowledged by Hoyle editors when describing how faro banks were opened and operated: "To justify the initial expenditure, a dealer must have some permanent advantage." Dealers employed several methods of cheating: Players would routinely cheat as well. Their techniques employed distraction and sleight-of-hand, and usually involved moving their stake to a winning card, or at the very least off the losing card, without being detected.