For Father's Day - #9 Card Games

Doral's son, Glen
Glen knows how to play most of these games.
As well, he can ghost Doral's voice when he plays.

Doral taught us to play cards and to play with cards.

Here are some of the games:

Four Robbers

With a deck of cards in his hands, Doral would have taken the four Jacks out. Then he would tell the story that the robbers went to rob a mansion, each going in at a different floor, and so he would put each of the Jacks into the deck of cards at a different place. Somehow an alarm was sounded, Doral would hit the top of the deck and out of the top of the roof, (i.e., the top of the deck), the Jacks would pop, one, two, three, four.

On How To Spell the Numbers on a Deck of Cards

I would sit by Doral and he had that elusive deck of cards in his hands again. He would tell me he could spell the deck. Then he would say (while flipping over cards), A–C–E and then up would flip an ace; T-W-O, two and the next card he would flip over would be a two, and so forth to the end of the deck, Q-U-E-E-N, queen. I could not figure out how to do that until I was much older and went on an internet search. However, my sister, Bonnie, figured it out as a teen and then showed Doral how she could do it. He was very interested in how she figured it out. That was one of the adult moments for me when I could see that Doral was really fascinated by how other people’s brains worked, not just his kids, but he was interested in the thinking of everyone he met.

Cribbage

Doral played cribbage. Often he would drop in at Floyd Albiston’s. They would sit and place three games of cribbage or so. Then Doral would leave.

“A good game,” he told me, “when your children can do combinations up to 8 and 7 for example.”

This is not a good game for me. People do Muggins me so often that they start to feel sorry for me.

I have been left behind the stink hole many times. Still, I will play cribbage. Just not well. It is one of the games my father taught me and for me it is about the relationship and not the win.

Oh Hell

When Aunt Erva came to visit we played two games, either “Oh Hell” or “Who’s Got the Queen”. I can’t remember the rules for Oh Hell, but I can remember practising the inflection of that phrase when I was alone. Nobody could say it quite like Erva or Doral. To practise, drop your voice and get a guttural sound in the second word.

Who’s Got the Queen

This is a simple game but Doral added a whole new layer to it. He could get rid of the Queen, but he could also drop it as a taunt on someone who had a winning score, thus changing the odds against them winning.

He had a good sense of timing in this regard.

Nines

Two folk know how the game runs, two or more. But some don’t. So the fun is for them to figure out what signals the others are giving so that they know the answer as to which card has been turned around, or if what is laid out are books, then which book has been touched.

To play the game, arrange 9 cards on the table in 3 rows of 3’s.

1. One person who knows how to play the game leaves the room. Those who don’t know how to play the game turn one card around.

2. The person now re-enters the room. The main player asks, is it this one, is it that one, etc. 3. The clue is blatant once you know it. If you don’t know it, you get to think of all of the ways clues could be given.

(The Answer): Since there are 3 rows of 3, on the first question, when the main player asks, Is it this card?, he always points to the place on the card where the object that has been turned wouold be, if it were drawn there as 3 sets of 3. Now he can always point there, or just the first time, depending on how long you want the game to go on.)

Just a fun quick party game to warm up the crowd. I have seen this done with 9 books laid on the carpet, and person says he can do it if someone will just touch a book – then the person who goes out can do it by just sniffing the book and then going around and pretending to identify by scent.

I think I have taken longer, telling how to play this game, than it takes to play the game!

Arta

(#9 of 15, to be continued)