Game 126: Rack-O

Now that Jacob and Caleb have moved out, David and I have to search our memory-banks to remember which games we own that are two-player games.  Rack-O is one I'm sure we haven't played in well over a decade.  It's a game for 2 to 4 players.  His family had this game while he was growing up, and when he and I were dating it was a game we would play when we spent time with his family.  I think we bought our copy early-on in our marriage, as the instruction booklet has our wedding year as the copyright date.  It had been so long since we played that though we remembered that the goal was to put the cards in the racks in order from lowest to highest we didn't remember how to start or if we played with fewer cards if there were only two players and how the scoring went and so on.  It was easy enough to figure out.  It's a very basic game, but it's one of those games where you can talk while you play, and sometimes that's what we want.
Here was my first deal.  I have a long way to go to get cards in order!
On your turn you take a card from the deck or from the discard pile and swap it for a card in your rack.
We played a number of hands.  I called "Rack-O" on this one (meaning I had all my cards going  from low to high and had a run of at least 3 in a row.  It's really too bad here we weren't playing with the bonus-point rules!!  My run of 5 would have been worth quite a bit!
While we were at it, I decided to pull a couple of games off the shelves.  This other game, Rumis, is one that I've blogged about already (#51) - a gift to David from Brianna a while back.  I'm always drawn to games of territory, even though I always do terribly, especially against David who has a very good eye for any sort of territory game whether it involves two dimensions or three dimensions.  Well, hopefully we have many more years together to keep improving our game(s).
In the first round I really wasn't thinking clearly about how scoring is done, but I earned 15 points, and David got 17, so the first round was close even though he won.  In the second round I was very clear-headed about what I was doing, but, apparently, so was he.  He completely blocked me off, and when we finished he had played all his pieces, and I have half of mine still left!

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