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 ...

 As you know if you've been reading this blog, I'm not counting all the card games we play with a standard deck - only our top 5 or 10 total (which seems fair since we have hundreds of decks of cards on our shelves).  Dutch  has recently become one of those favorite games.  Unlike Pedro or Scribbage , this is not one that we've been playing for years and years.  This is a game our son Jacob taught us about a year ago after having learned it while on a missions trip to Thailand.  We hear the kids he worked with in Thailand are absolute rock stars at this game.  It took me quite a few hands to pick up some good strategy. Each player is dealt 4 cards to begin with.  These cards are set out in front of you, and you may look at two of them.  The goal is to have the lowest point total at the end of the game.  On your turn you draw a card, and you may replace one of the face-down cards with the card you have drawn - discarding the card...

Again, it's hard to get an "accurate" count of games for reasons laid out in other posts.  One of the hardest decisions on count has to do with card games.  We love them.  We have lots of decks (100 or so?) on our shelves, so it seems only fair to count at least a handful of card games that are among our very favorites.  Pedro is one of these. I know Pedro as a game that is played among the Azorean (Portuguese) population of California's central valley.  (I imagine it may be played under other names or in other formats elsewhere.)  This is my heritage on my dad's side of the family.  My dad tells stories of his grandfathers playing this game, and I grew up playing it.  I remember as a kid playing this at my cousins' house.  Sometimes Uncle Paul would join in; he had a unique way of playing.  If he had the top three cards in trump, he would lead off with the queen rather than the ace.  He felt confident, and I imagine he wanted ...

 I remember first seeing Cribbage in my parent's game closet.  The thing that made me want to learn to play was that the box had images of horses on it and made it look like it related to horse racing.  Since one of my fondest dreams in childhood was to own a horse I was drawn to what I thought this game was.  It turns out it has pretty much nothing to do with horses - though I suppose the players are racing around a track with their pegs.  I don't remember when I first learned how to play, but early in our marriage David and I used to play game after game of this - nearly endlessly.  Above and below are pictures of our first hand today.  I dealt first, so David laid a card first, and the "crib" (4 cards off to the right-hand side) was mine.  Six cards for each hand, but then each player has to decide which 4 of those cards to keep and which 2 to put into the crib for the dealer.  Scoring takes place as you lay cards (for hitting 15, hit...

This card game is based on the scoring (of the hand) for Cribbage.  It's a game for 2 to 4 players with one player or team scoring the points in the rows and the other player or team scoring the points in the columns.  It involves a good combination of chance and strategy and also of having to choose  between offense and defense with each card placement. OK, so I said the idea behind this blog was that of playing through all our games.  I guess this post feels a bit like cheating, since more than 5000 games can be played with one deck of cards, therefore this whole blog could be taken up with merely multitudes of games from one deck of cards.  On the other hand, we have dozens of decks of standard playing cards around the house (see below for one such cluster), and therefore to not include any such games would be leaving out much of what constitutes gaming for us.  So I'll take a middle road and only include a handful of favorites.  The two-p...