Creative Card Play

Last week Jr. came to me and convinced me that I really needed to play cards with her. So I worked in a few games of UNO in between playing in George's pretend band and eating my dinner (George got to be lead guitarist, but I played a mean couch cushion drum).

What really made the UNO game interesting was the way it was played. Before I get into how the game was played, I think I ought to point out that at my house Monopoly and many a grown up game is played with very unique rules. For instance, when you land on a property on the Monopoly game board and it is not owned and choose to buy the property, you get to immediately choose to place a green house or a red hotel on the property, thereby marking your territory. Houses and hotels do not affect the going rental rate by the way. This is a habit picked up from Disney Princess Monopoly; however, in Disney Princess Monopoly everyone gets castles in their own color, which helps to distinguish who owns what. One day someone is going to show them the real Monopoly rules...heaven help that person!

Back to Jr.'s UNO game. Apparently when you play UNO with Dad the rules dictate that you get to place all the "Wilds" and "Draw Four Wilds" in your own hand and then deal Dad a normal hand. Thus after I would play a card from my hand Jr. would wallup me with a "Draw Four Wild" and then choose a color that she knew I didn't have. Then she would let me continue drawing until I found the color I needed.

This worked pretty good for Jr. until she got down to one card left and I said "UNO" before she remembered to or I played my own "Draw Two" card as this caused her to pick up cards that weren't "Wilds". However, Fred soon came to Jr.'s rescue and whenever Jr. was forced to pick a card from the pile, Fred would make sure to look through the deck for Jr. and find a nice skip or reverse in the color Jr. needed.

The upside to all of this is that my misery of holding half the deck in my hand would generally go by pretty quickly as games didn't last that long!