Game 84: Bridge

 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 interest for me."  As you can imagine, that made me even more eager to learn, and I've had to wait a long time.

 This was my first hand.  Even as someone who had never played before, it was pretty obvious to me that this was a really bad hand!  After waiting so long to learn, this was kind of a bummer.

 After a trick is played, you pull your card back in front of you and place it horizontally if it's a hand you lost and vertically if it's a hand you won; in this way you always still have all the cards that were in your hand.  This allowed us to lay out all our cards post-game to talk through how we did bid and how we should have bid.  It's basically a game involving trump, bidding and taking tricks.  I am nowhere near knowing enough about this game to write either a description or a critique, but I do know enough to work at the puzzle in the paper now, and for that I am grateful.

So, as the title states, this blog is about all the games on our shelves - specifically it is about counting all the games on our shelves.  Technically, Bridge is not "a game on our shelves," but we do have at least 100 decks of playing cards, so it has been my policy to post about favorite games, or games of particular interest, using a 52-card deck.  Because of my long desire to learn this game, it has made the list.  If I have counted correctly this is now my fifth post of a game using a standard deck of playing cards, so that seems fair given the number of decks on our shelves.  There will be a few more yet, but I'm trying to not overdo it on card games with a standard deck.

I'm a teacher, and it's summer, so I thought I would be posting a lot more frequently, but my posts are about games that haven't been counted yet - haven't appeared here yet.  And while we are gaming this summer, we are spending most of our time on old favorites rather than pulling others off the shelves.  One we've been focused on quite a bit in recent weeks is Pandemic Legacy.  We played again tonight.

SPOILER ALERT

If you are playing Pandemic Legacy you might not want to look at the remaining to pictures on this post, as they may give away information to you about such things as where undiscovered havens are or where the laboratories are or what elements might pop up in the game as you open boxes along the way.  If you've already played through it or aren't planning to play it, you can safely read on.

Here's a picture of our board at this point, and below that is a picture of how much progress we've made.  As you play through this game you add elements to the board.  We've added a number of stickers that have enlarged our world as we have done recon in various places.  We've won more than we've lost, so I'm feeling pretty good about it.  It's a pretty challenging game, but as we put all our gamer-heads together we generally do pretty well unless the cards are really stacked against us.