Traditional Card Games in Singapore

The games Singapore plays at its own tables

Step into a Singapore home during Chinese New Year, a family birthday or a long weekend and you may find a card table set up before the food is served. The games on it are not the ones you will see at Marina Bay Sands. They are older, smaller and more social.

Here is the lineup in one view:

What these games share is scale. They are built for a handful of players around one table, with stakes that are usually small and scoring that everyone can follow. Two of them, Ban Luck and Ceki, are strongly tied to Singapore's own communities: Ban Luck is a fixture of Chinese New Year gatherings, and Ceki belongs to the Peranakan tradition. The others traveled here with traders and migrants and found a permanent place in the mix.

If you want the full story on the most popular of them, we have a separate page on Ban Luck. This page covers that game in outline and gives the others their own space, ending with the one question every host quietly checks: whether playing cards for money at home is allowed. The short answer is yes, within limits, and we cover those limits once, at the end.

Ban Luck: Singapore's homegrown blackjack

Ban Luck is the game most Singaporeans think of when they think of cards. It is blackjack with local accents: the same goal of beating a banker's hand without going past 21, the same rhythm of drawing cards and deciding when to stop, but with house rules and bonus payouts that vary from family to family. The banker's seat usually rotates, and the special hands carry names of their own, which is where the game's character lives.

The core moves are the ones every blackjack player knows¹:

• Hit: ask for another card.
• Stand: keep what you have.
• Split: turn a pair into two hands, at the price of a second bet equal to the first.
• Double: match your bet and take exactly one more card, a bet on a strong hand.

The local flavor sits on top of that frame. A natural 21 in the first two cards is the hand everyone wants, and in Ban Luck the special starting hands, such as the two-ace Ban-ban, pay more than an ordinary win. Because the banker is usually a player rather than a house, the payouts are agreed at the table before the first deal, and part of the fun is arguing about them.

For the full rules, the bonus hands and the dealer's side of the table, read our dedicated page on Ban Luck.

How a hand of Ban Luck is played

A hand begins with bets placed and the banker dealing. Each player gets their cards, checks the total, and then works through the standard choices in turn.

The decision that matters most is the split. A player holding two cards of the same kind can separate them into two individual hands, but the price of doing so is a second bet equal to the first. The dealer gives the first hand its extra card first, and the player plays that hand out, hitting, standing or doubling, before the second hand is touched¹. This is why a split is both an opportunity and a risk: you have twice the money on the table and two hands to get right.

Around that spine, house rules fill in the rest:

• Some tables let you double on any two cards, some only on totals of 9, 10 or 11.
• Some treat five-card hands that have not busted as automatic winners.
• None of this is written anywhere official, because Ban Luck is a home game: the rules are whatever the table agrees, and the banker usually has the last word.

Ban Luck payouts and dealer bonus rules

The baseline payout is the blackjack standard. A winning natural, an ace plus a ten-value card in the first two, is traditionally paid at 3 to 2, meaning you receive three dollars for every two you bet⁶. Ordinary winning hands pay even money.

On top of that, Ban Luck tables add their own bonus schedule. The named hands, like Ban-ban, pay multiples of the stake, and the banker's position carries its own rules: because the banker plays against everyone at once, bonus payments usually flow to or from the banker in doubled form. Each family's version differs, so the practical habit is to settle the payout table before the shoe is opened, not after someone turns over a surprise.

If you are playing in one of Singapore's two licensed casinos instead of a living room, the game there is standard casino blackjack, not Ban Luck, and the payouts are the house's, not the table's. The casino entry levy applies to citizens and permanent residents who want to sit down at those tables.

Ceki: the Peranakan card game of sets

Ceki is the card game of the Peranakan community, and it does not look like blackjack at all. It is a game of building sets. The objective is to form three "mata", or sets, each made of three cards of the same value regardless of suit². Where Ban Luck is about the tension of one total, Ceki is about the slow satisfaction of collecting matches.

The game uses a double pack, and each player receives eight cards, dealt two at a time clockwise, four times around². From that hand of eight, you trade, draw and discard your way toward your three sets. The cards themselves are distinctive: the deck includes the "kaki" cards, which follow their own rules. Kaki cards only form sets of the same pattern, meaning three yu nyonya, three yu kucing or three yu lau chian together².

The moment of drama is the call. A player who achieves two full mata and one pair shouts "ceki" while placing the pair face down, and from that point may no longer change the two completed sets². It is a declaration that locks your hand: right or wrong, you are committed.

Ceki scoring and payouts

Scoring is arithmetic, and it rewards high-value sets. Each mata is worth the sum of its card values, so a set of three sevens, a "jit mata", is worth 21 points². The exception is the kaki cards, which are worth only one point each, so a kaki set scores just 3 points². That is the trade-off built into the deck: the special cards are easier to match but worth almost nothing.

Money follows the points directly. At the end of each round, the winner receives an amount equal to the points scored, paid by the opponents². There is no fixed stake or multiplier: the table agrees what a point is worth, and the settlement is simple multiplication. A hand with three strong mata can cost the losers a great deal more than a hand scraped together from kaki cards, which is why experienced players watch the discards for high cards early and count what is still out.

Thirteen cards, three hands: Chinese poker

Thirteen-card Chinese poker, called shisan zhang in Mandarin and known in many Singapore homes simply as "thirteen", takes the poker hands you know and rearranges them into a game of arrangement rather than betting. Each player gets thirteen cards and sorts them into three hands: a top row of 3 cards, a middle row and a bottom row, each stronger than the one above it³. You are not betting or bluffing hand by hand. You are building three poker hands at once and then comparing them, row against row, with every other player.

The game is flexible about numbers. It is played with two, three or four players⁷, which makes it a good fit for a table that has lost or gained someone mid-afternoon. Scoring is in points, and each point has an agreed monetary value³, so the settlement at the end is a grid of comparisons: you win or lose points against each opponent in each row, and the totals are added up and paid.

Because there is no betting round, the skill is in the sorting. A hand that looks strong can be arranged badly, and a mediocre thirteen cards can be split so that every row just beats the player to your left. Big Two, or Dai Di, a cousin game that uses five-card poker hands and singles played trick by trick, shares this family resemblance: familiar poker shapes, unfamiliar rhythm. If poker itself is what you are after, our page on poker in Singapore covers where the modern game is played.

Four color cards

Four color cards, or Si Se Pai, look like nothing else on this list. The deck is small and the cards are narrow strips printed in four colors, red, green, white and yellow. There are 7 types of card, and they carry the same characters as in Chinese chess⁸. If you know the general or the soldier from a xiangqi board, you will recognize them here.

The game plays as a capture-and-collect game in the mahjong family rather than a poker relative. You draw, you discard, and you watch what others take. The sharp edge is the steal: you can steal a card that someone has drawn or discarded in 3 situations, namely to win, to make a Quad, which is forced, or to make a Triplet unless it is a King⁸. That rule gives four color cards its tactical bite. Nothing is safe on the table, and a card you draw can be taken from you before your turn ends if it completes someone else's four of a kind.

Four color cards is slower and quieter than Ban Luck and more like mahjong in temperament. It is a game for players who enjoy watching the pile, remembering what has gone, and waiting for the one card that finishes a set. Tables are usually found in the same homes and clubs where mahjong is played, and the two games often share the same cloth.

Balut: the five-dice game

Balut is the odd one out here, because it uses dice rather than cards, but it belongs at the same table. It began as a dice game among expatriates in Asia and spread widely, and it plays like a richer version of the Western game Yahtzee. The game is played with five six-sided dice⁴, and in each turn the dice can be rolled up to three times⁴, with the player setting aside the dice they want to keep between rolls.

The scoring sheet is where Balut grows beyond its cousin. There are a total of 7 possible combinations, and each combination can be scored four times⁴, which stretches the game out: each player plays 28 rounds in all to score⁴. Four chances at a full house, four chances at a straight, four chances at the dice-named Balut itself, which is five of a kind. The player earning the most points wins the game⁴.

On top of the combination scores sit bonuses for the final total:

Those bonus points are why experienced players sometimes pass up a safe combination late in the game and gamble on a big one: the difference between finishing at 480 and finishing at 520 is not just 40 points, it is a bonus band⁴.

Is social card gambling legal in Singapore?

This is the one legal question worth asking about these games, and the answer is short. Gambling activities in Singapore are prohibited unless they are exempted or licensed⁹, but home card games among family and friends sit inside the exemption. Under the Gambling Control Act 2022, physical social gambling among family and friends is permitted, provided it takes place in person and in an individual's home, and the participants are family members or people who know each other personally⁵. The law spells out the same conditions: the game must be in a home in Singapore, among family or personal acquaintances, substantially spontaneous, not run for anyone's private gain or as a business, with profit coming only from winning¹⁰.

Two boundaries matter in practice:

• It is illegal to gamble in any public place in Singapore, even among family and friends, so the coffee shop table and the void deck are out⁵.
• Social gambling is not permitted on online platforms, so a home game moved to a video call with real stakes stops being social gambling⁵.

Playing on an unapproved gaming machine is a separate matter, and an individual who plays a game of chance for a prize on such a machine, knowing or reasonably ought to know it is prohibited, commits an offense¹¹.

So the practical rule for a card evening in Singapore is simple: keep it in a home, keep it among people who actually know each other, keep it spontaneous, and keep the banker's seat rotating rather than running a business. Within that, Ban Luck, Ceki, Chinese poker, four color cards and Balut are all part of the ordinary furniture of Singapore life, and the stakes are whatever the table agrees they are. For the wider picture of what is licensed and what is not, see our page on gambling in Singapore.