The Versatility of Playing Cards

The other day I was in a waiting room with a friend, waiting, when I realized I should have brought a deck of cards. When you have a deck of cards, you can play all sorts of games. Now, I am a bit out of practice. In fact, I can't remember half the rules to half the games I used to know. But I can remember enough to play Hearts (sort of), or Five Card Draw Poker (probably), or (shudder) War.

 

Cards with educational illustrations

When I was a kid, my mother taught me how to play Pounce, which is like double solitaire except that you only have four cards in front of you to build on, and you have a pounce pile of thirteen cards to get rid of. We madly slapped cards into the common area, building on aces, and I always got hung up on trying to get lots of cards in the center. As a result, my mother usually yelled, "Pounce!" first and I had to deduct twice the number of cards left in my pounce pile. That's a lot of points, so I tended to lose.

When we stayed at my granny's, we sometimes had enough people to play "Oh, Hell!" I'm sure it goes by other names as well, but "Oh, Hell!" was what you said when you found yourself taking more tricks than you had predicted you would take. (I don't remember if we kids actually said that, but I'm sure my granny did.) I don't remember the rules very well, except that you got a bonus for taking the number of tricks you predicted, or, if you went over, a bonus if you could take all the tricks, and the number of cards in hand changed each round, from thirteen down by odd numbers to one and then back up again. Or something like that.

My uncle liked solitaire, so sometimes when he was there he would demonstrate the many variations of that game. He laid out the cards in the shape of a triangle, or counted out different piles... I was never all that fond of solitaire and didn't learn any of them well enough to remember them now, other than the basic seven-pile solitaire. But solitaire is a game you can play even if no one else is around, so it's got that in its favor. And playing with cards rather than a computer gives you the option of cheating. Just a little, you know.

I could try to map out the timeline of my life in card games. In college, I learned some of the many variations of poker, including that silly one where you only have one card and you hold it on your forehead (I think that counts as poker--it's a betting game, anyway.) As a newlywed, I learned cribbage, which was a lot of fun and which I have mostly forgotten again (points for adding up to fifteen, and also... series?... and marking points on the cribbage board, of course.) When my daughter was young, we occasionally played War (who doesn't? and who keeps playing after they've learned something more exciting?) and then moved on to Go Fish and Crazy Eights. I don't remember playing Crazy Eights as a kid, and I feel like I missed out. I like Crazy Eights, though I keep forgetting if you can play eights any time you want, or only if you can't follow suit.

As my daughter and I made our way through the Nancy Drew computer games (by Herinteractive--I recommend these for mother-daughter pairs who like puzzles), we found ourselves playing Scopa with a character in The Phantom of Venice. Interesting game, with a forty-card deck and different suits. Then my daughter and friends started playing Slapjack at lunch in middle school. She showed me the game, though--again-- I've forgotten the details, but the appeal was clear--slapping your hand down on a card faster than your opponent. Yeah, I can see how that would play well in middle school. They probably had bruised hands by the time they were done.

I don't play card games very often (by which I mean games played with a regular fifty-two card deck, not other kinds of card games, like Munchkin). Even so, I love decks of cards. I admire their versatility. All you need is a standard deck, available at most drugstores, and you've got a whole world of games open to you. Not only that, but decks of cards, like chess sets, are a vehicle for art. I often buy them as souvenirs, figuring I can have photos of Biltmore or New England AND something to play games with. 

 

Souvenir cards

 

We also have educational sets that illustrate sea creatures, birds, or flowers, and a cute set with hamsters. I have a set that offers optical illusions, a set that is basically a bunch of different pieces of art (not practical as it is very hard to tell what some of the cards are supposed to represent), as well as standard decks with ornamental backs. 

 

Cards with interesting faces

 

For that matter, I still have the set I got when I was in fifth grade, with a yellow daisy deck and a red heart deck. It comes with its own box, which is nice, but if you don't have a box for your cards, you can always make them a pretty tuckbox to keep them from getting scattered.

Cards with interesting backs

And if you don't like card games, you can always build houses out of them.

Till next post.