All the Games on Our Shelves

 Once again it's time to share a game that can be played with one of the hundreds of standard 52-card decks from our shelves.  This time it's Hearts .  Again, a game we hadn't played in years but one I remember playing a lot in the past; I seem to recall it being on that we played often with David's siblings.  Anyway  .  .  .  we were visiting our oldest son and his family in Long Beach this weekend, so we were, of course, gaming.  Hearts was David's choice.  We had already played Sushi Go  and No Thanks , and Jacob was really jonesin' to play Deception , but David got his way on this one  .  .  .  In Hearts you deal out all the cards, and whatever cards are left become a kitty that is taken by the first player to take a trick containing points.  Each heart is worth 1 point, and the queen of spades is worth 13 points.  The goal is to get the fewest points.  There is the option to "shoot the ...

 I thought for sure I had posted about this game already, but as I was in the midst of my last "BONUS post" about a recent game night I realized I hadn't.  I love the Oriental look and feel to this game.  I've never thought much about strategy with it;  I just enjoy the beauty and the flow.  That's pretty different for me.  Normally I'm very competitive and strategy-driven, but it almost seems that this game is about meditation, kind of like a table-top sand garden or something.  I'm sure if I wanted to spend time considering all possible configurations of tiles and so on that I could make this game be about strategy, but it's kind of nice once in a while to just play and talk and not think too much.  The board is beautiful, and the pieces are unique and appealing, so I figure maybe it's OK to have a game that feels more like art than like a battle.  I still like to win, of course, which I did this time around, but here I feel OK just going...

 Tyler and Anna are so good at getting us out of our house and over to theirs for marathon gaming, and it is always a marathon when we get together.  Currently "we" has included the two of them, me and David and our two youngest boys, Jacob and Caleb.  Our first game of the night is one we had not played before: Deep Sea Adventure .  It's not yet on our shelves, but this one is going on my wish list.  It's a very simple game to learn and to play, but after the two rounds we played I'm still not quite sure how to go about determining effective strategy on this one.  I love games like this - simple rules involving possibility of deep strategy.  This is one I want to come back to.  (I also like the fact that it comes in a nice, compact box!)  The idea of Deep Sea Adventure is that of diving for treasure and trying to get as much as you can without being so greedy that you run out of oxygen and don't survive the journey!  The original ...

 It had always bothered me that there was one puzzle on the puzzle page in the newspaper that I wasn't able to do.  I can do the crossword.  I can do the Jumble.  I can do the Sudoku.  I can do the chess problem.  But I didn't know how to play Bridge, so I couldn't do that puzzle, and it bugged me!  Though I am certainly not an expert, I recently got some instruction, and I am now at peace.  :-) Our youngest son graduated from college this year, and in his most recent interim (i.e. winter term) he took a class on Bridge.  Our oldest son had done the same thing quite a few years ago, so when we were all together about a week ago we found a window of time when Anthony and Caleb could sit down with me and David and share their Bridge knowledge with us.  I remember Anthony saying, just after he had taken this class, "I don't know if I can play Pinochle anymore because Bridge is so superior that I don't know if Pinochle would still hold int...