TABLE AND CARD GAMES
TABLE AND CARD GAMES
Card Games and Others
Card games proper, such as Bezique and Cribbage and Whist, do not come into the scope of this book. Nor do games such as Chess, Draughts, Halma and Backgammon. It is not that they are not good games, but that, having to be bought, their rules do not need enumerating again. The description of a few very old and favorite games with cards, and one or two new ones, is, however, given, because they can be made at home.
Letter Games
On [page 178] will be found the simplest letter game. Letters can be used for a round game by one player making a word, shuffling it, and throwing it face upward into the middle of the table. The winner is the player who first sees what it spells.
Distribute a box of letters among the players, dealing them face downward. In turn each player takes up a letter at random and puts it face upward in the middle of the table. The object of the game is to make words out of these letters. Directly a player sees a word he calls it out, and taking the letters places them in front of him, where they remain until the end of the game, when each player counts his words and the owner of the greatest number is the winner. If, however, a word has been chosen which, by the addition of another letter or so from the middle of the table, can be transformed into a longer word, the player who thinks of this longer word takes the shorter word from the other player and places it before himself. Thus, A might see the word "seat" among the letters, and calling it out, place it before him; and then B, noticing another "t," might call out "state," and adding it to A's word, take that to himself. If, however, A then detected an "e" in the middle and called out "estate" the word would be his again. These losses and reconquests form the chief fun of the game. An "s" at the end of a word, forming a plural, is not allowed.