Where Shithead comes from
The short version: nobody knows, and anyone who claims to is playing a house rule. Shithead belongs to a family of shedding games that surfaces across northern Europe, with its clearest ancestor in the Scandinavian game Vändtia, "turn ten", where the 10's pile-burning power was already at work. What we know for certain is how it spread: backpackers.
The hostel game
Shithead is the great traveller's game. It needs one cheap deck, no table worth protecting, and ten minutes to teach in any language. Through the eighties and nineties it moved along the backpacker trails, from European hostels to the banana pancake circuit, mutating as it went. That's why an Australian, a Swede and two Brits can sit down to play and discover they know four different games with the same name, and why the same game answers to Palace in America, Karma in card-app stores, and Shed in politer households.
Why the rules never settled
Games with rulebooks stay still. Shithead was passed hand to hand, table to table, each teacher certain their version was the real one because it was the one they were taught. Every house rule on this site is a fossil of one of those handovers. We think that's rather lovely, and also that our official rules are correct.
The name
It survives translation because the concept does: whatever you call the game, the last player holding cards has earned something, and the something has never been a trophy. Some families soften it. Some pubs don't. We are a website called shitheads.co.uk; you can guess where we stand.