Games of a cartile nature

coldforge

Registered user

Posts: 11798

« on: Jan 10, 2008, 11:38:49 PM »

My father was a card player from wayback. He even told me there was a time when he was considering dropping out of college to become a professional pokerist in Vegas. I'm not sure how well that would have turned out; Hold 'Em was never his game. He preferred stud, draw, hi-low—He was a man who delighted in the multitude of variations of the poker hand.

In high school, like every good lusty young man, I became more interested in the arts myself. As I was my tendency, I came to the thing a bit early, and evangelized and motivated my peers. Which meant I was the best card player in the senior lounge, see, because I had started on it first.

But I have since wearied of Poker. It was not, to be sure, ever a particularly underground pastime; by the time I got to it I considered it up there with baseball and exploitation as a great American recreation. But I will say that the great media exposure of several years past has had, to me, a detrimental effect to the game: it has brought out of the woodwork every would-be cardsharp, every failed business major whose Gordon Gecko dreams can nonetheless be played out at the cards table. In other words, it's the players that have soured it for me. Every side-hatted frat boy sidles up to the table with his unlit cigarette and wraparound shades and smirks in his sureness that he can bilk everyone else at the table.

He's wrong, of course; but I work for a living. I don't play cards just so I can surround myself with a bunch of money-hungry scum looking to bankrupt me; I have rent for that. The savor of a card game has always been in a) the interplay of the numbers and the cards themselves on the table, and the structures, narratives and drama they create; and b) the interplay of their holders, the narratives and structure and general enjoyment we create for ourselves. Not to mention, any evening where enjoying my whisky is actually advised against is a total downer.

So I'm a) removing money from the occasion and b) moving on to less grazed, more exotic pastures. It's twofold, I guess. Part of it is a love of the new, a curiosity, and an enjoyment of learning. The other half is enjoying that old homefield advantage which I secure for myself by being the one to discover and introduce the game at hand.

It's been working out well. My most habitual game these days is Scopa, a Sicilian of the category they call 'fishing'. Put simply, there are cards in the hand and on the table; you have to match the former to the latter, or match one of the former to several of the latter (by addition), and thereby capture them. What's fun is the variety of mechanisms by which you score points; I won't go into specifics. I play weekly, and it's good fodder for drink and conversation. Best with 2 teams of 2.

A friend taught me a quite widespread Russian game called Durak, as well. I find it a bit less balanced and less strategic than Scopa; basically one player plays some cards to the next in line, and that person has to beat each card or take them all in his hand. When a card is played anybody else at the table can pile on. In what feels like a very Slavic touch, there are no winners to this game, only losers. It's fun, especially when played quickly.

But most recently I've been playing a game called, depending on who you ask, Bela or Clobyosh. I think I first found it because it seems to be the only game accessible which is for whatever reason seen as characteristically Jewish. It's a trick-taking game, and it has a nice balance of features: a bidding element, but not as Axis & Allies as Bridge; combinations, but not too many; and a couple lovely wicked twists. My scopa buddies refuse to give it a second look, since at their first they deemed it too Byzantine and complicated. But they said that about scopa too. Anyway, there's a version online where you can play against the computer—both 2- and 4-handed versions.

So, that's what I've been doing lately. Have any of you had any experiences with the above three games (or Bouré, out of Louisiana, which my father taught me when I was young but I've never played in any great enough amount to comment on)? If not, what do you like to do for fun, cards-wise? Failing that, I suppose, you can talk about that time in poker night when you totally won like, 300 bucks off this one guy.


	Logged

è l'era del terzo mondo.

elpollodiablo

Registered user

Posts: 32076