The First Card Game
by Luckbox
Four of us sat in camping chairs around a cooler serving as a table and with nothing to help us see the cards except the glow of a fire and a few dim lanterns.
"It's gray," G-Rob said.
"How gray?" Otis replied.
"Charcoal."
Yet again, Uncle Ted and I were running over the table. We, frankly, couldn't be stopped. Call it collusion if you want, but in this game, we didn't mind. In fact, in this game, you can't win without it.
Euchre
It's the first card game I played with the G-Vegas crew. As you can see from G-Rob's post about frolf, the G-Vegas crew has rolled through a few obsessions over the years. For awhile, we couldn't get enough Euchre. In fact, we began referring to it only as M.E.N. (Marathon Euchre Night). It doesn't get much more gay than that... but, I digress...
Here is where I toot my own horn. I was (and probably still am) a killer Euchre player. It's a great game and I love the strategy involved. But it lacked something... the gamble. We never did put any real money on our games (not that pride wasn't enough of a prize). And that's a shame, because I would have cleaned up.
Cribbage
Cribbage is a game that's been in my family for years. My grandfather played it back during his Navy days. It's one of the first card games I learned to play despite the complicated nature of the rules.
Back when my sister got engaged, my Dad challenged my soon-to-be-brother-in-law to a game of cribbage. If he won, he got to marry my sister. He won. I think my Dad had a few beers that night because my brother-in-law isn't very good at the game. I was. Here's that horn tooting again.
There were family vacations where we would set up a cribbage tournament. I wasn't always the best in the family, but in this game, sometimes the cards just don't fall your way. I suppose that's true of every card game... so it's a lesson I learned very young.
Canasta
If there's one game I remember playing before Cribbage, it was Canasta. Apparently, it was really popular on my Dad's side of the family. This one could be played with as many as 6 players which made it a lot of fun.
I'm not sure how good I really was. In my mind, I was awesome... but I stopped playing that game regularly in my early teens. I don't think looking back 15 or 20 years is easy. I wouldn't mind playing again soon.
Oh S$%!
In Wikipedia, this one is known as Oh Hell. Apparently my family enjoyed the more obscene varient. This is a game my family still plays every time we get together. It's a perfect game for a group that enjoys screwing each other over as often as possible. Maybe I should get a blogger league together...
I'm going to tell you that it's hard to be good at this game... but that's probably only because I'm not very good at it. I lose at this on a regular basis, and I lose badly. But it's a game we play so much that my Dad has invented new rules, adding jokers to the deck.
In a few weeks, I'll be seeing my family for my niece's first birthday. I'm sure we'll get a few hands in.
So what about poker? Poker is the newest card game on the list. It's one I first started learning from my father. Then I stumbled into a dealer's choice game with a few degenerates in G-Vegas. And then, this all happened. I wonder how much I'd still be playing if I was still back in South Cackalacky. Playing online is fine... but, as you can gather from the descriptions above, it's still the social part of the games that appeals to me the most.
