Fig. 2
This is a fine game for rainy days. Any boy can make it and if he likes to use pencil and paint brush he will find it as interesting to make as to play with. Get a small pasteboard box about six inches long by three wide and an inch deep—such as spools of cotton come in. Cover it with white paper, pasting it neatly and securely. Then draw and colour on the lid a mail bag, which should almost cover it—either a brown leather sack or a white canvas one with "United States Mail" on it in large blue letters. Do not forget to draw the holes at the top of the bag and the rope which passes through them to close it. You have now something to hold the counters for the game. These are made to look like letters and postal cards. To make the letters, rule a set of lines three-quarters of an inch apart, across a box or cover of shiny white cardboard. Then another set, crossing the others at right angles. These should be an inch and a quarter apart. The postal cards are ruled in the same way (on real, unused postal cards), so as to make oblong spaces. Cut these out with a sharp pair of scissors. There should be thirty cardboard pieces and at least twenty-five of the postal cards. Now draw on the cards, with a fine pen and black ink, marks like those on a postal card—the stamp in the corner, the lettering and the address. Make pen lines on all of the pasteboard letters like Fig. 2 and paint a tiny red dot on each to look like sealing-wax. On the reverse side of one write something to look like an address, and paint in large letters "D.L.O.," (to stand for Dead Letter Office) in the corner. Six other letters are also addressed in the same way, but have instead of "D.L.O." a red stamp and a blue one, the latter wider than it is high, to represent a Special Delivery stamp. Nine pieces should also be cut from brown cardboard in the shape shown in Fig. 3 to represent packages. Paint three red stamps in the corner of each of these.
Rules for Playing United States Mail
Fig. 3
Two or more persons can play this game. When the pieces are equally divided among the players, the one on the right of the dealer throws a piece on the table, saying as he does so, "I send a letter to B——," for example, and then counts five, not running the numbers in together, but as deliberately as a clock ticks. Before he has stopped counting, the player on his right must name a city or town beginning with B. If he succeeds in doing this he wins the piece, otherwise it goes to the player who threw it. When all the pieces have been played each player counts his score.
The value of the pieces is as follows: Each postal card counts one, each letter two, each package six. The Special Delivery letters are worth ten points each, and the person who is so unfortunate as to have the letter with "D.L.O." upon it loses ten points from his score.