Playing UNO

At the Zoo
Richard and his 3 ducklings

I never know which board game I am going to be playing until Alice, Michael and Betty are at the table and we have the game in front of us.

I asked Michael for a quick game of Splendor which would have meant he played his hand and I sit with Alice, letting her pick up chips and buy cards so that the game still seems interesting to her as well.

But I am doing the thinking. She just needs a little of my brain power, which she is not all that willing to accept. And in fact, sometimes the game breaks down, or maybe the game moves speedily ahead, when Michael shows her the right move to make against him – and then she accepts his advice and on we go, picking up chips and buying mines. She can even win this way.

At any rate, Splendor is the game I invited him into, yesterday. But when I got to the table he had the pack of UNO cards in his hands and was dealing out 7 to each person. All of us have trouble keeping the rules of each game from shifting from one game into another. It is even hard to figure out who begins the game. In Splendor, the youngest person at the table starts. In Cribbage the person who cuts the highest card deals and gets the first crib. In UNO the person to the left of the dealer begins. We have had to go to the rules to figure this out – twice. UNO’s way of starting the game is a nice distribution of labour, since Alice likes the part of dealing out seven cards (please check that you have seven) and Michael knows that to begin the game may just give you a better chance at winning.

It must have been Michael who took a few of the cards and gave them to Betty. She sat within reaching distance of us, but she quietly shuffled and ordered the cards she was given. Loosing some of the cards was no problem to us, since the UNO deck is more than two inches high with cards, any more than can be comfortably shuffled, either by new shufflers or by people with arthritic fingers.