LET'S PLAY CARDS

^{Self painted card game}

Today is about changing rules. Anyone who knows me is familiar with this: one of my favourite topics.
The best thing is when rules are changed in a playful, experimental way. There is the least annoyance and all people benefit from it. That would certainly be something for politics, which often seems boring. Which it doesn't have to be. But that's another topic. As you may assume this is not only about card playing. Also some further thought is going to be interwoven here. It's about playing! And how can this not be philosophical? Let us begin.

Everybody knows Mau Mau.

The game with usually 32 cards is about being the first to get rid of the cards in your hand. The cards are laid face up on the table from your hand. If there is a Nine of hearts, either the same suit (heart) can be laid or a nine of a different suit. If there is a Queen of Spades, you can play a different suit or any card of Spades. And so on.

You look at the following moves from your perspective, i.e. when you lay them:

A Seven means that your neighbour must take two cards.

If the neighbor also has a Seven in his hand, he can extend the move and his neighbor must now take four cards, unless he also has a Seven in his hand. The player who does not have a Seven must now pick up the corresponding number of cards.

An Eight means that your neighbour misses a turn.

A Jack means you can wish for a colour (heart, diamonds, spades or clubs).

Some also assign a meaning to the "Nine":

when it is placed, the game changes direction and then runs counterclockwise until someone places another Nine. If you place the Nine, the neighbor to your right is again in turn.

If you think about it, then some rules in the card game are actually already rule violations. If you change direction, it's like a spontaneous and surprising change and you have to adjust immediately to a new situation. Let's be honest: You could tell those who have difficulty spontaneously getting involved with something new and practising it playfully to play cards. You won't believe how painful it sometimes is not to get one's act together with the intended card and how good it is to just let this sensation go! No time to mope, the game goes on, doesn't it?

If you only have one card left in your hand, you have to announce it loudly with "last card!". Who forgets the announcement, draws a penalty card, as soon as the neighboring player plays his hand or has put his card on the table. The player who lays his last card wins: Mau Mau!

Changing Rules

But: we have extended this game and play it with 64 cards, i.e. a double deck, from Seven to Ace. Let me introduce now our own creation of the game.

All players now receive 10 cards.
If there are four or five players, we reduce it to 8 cards per hand. So that the undivided deck has enough cards to hold.
If you have two cards of the same suit and symbol in your hand, for example two Tens of Diamonds, you can place them on the face-up pile in one stroke. You can also play them individually.

In doing our own creation, we've given the Heart Colors meaning.

Note: Now that all cards are doubled, each of them is dealt in eight instead of four copies.

Jack of Hearts:

This Jack can not only wish a colour, but concretely a number or figure, completely at will. This makes it a very strong and coveted card! For example, I can wish myself a Queen of Hearts because I enjoy the pain of the other player (I explain below, why this could be painful), or I wish myself a Ten of Hearts because I hold these cards and want to play them.

Of course, it is always possible that this wish will be fulfilled by the other players and until it is my turn again, I have already lost the advantage. But if none of the players can fulfill my wish (or strategically prefer to draw a card from the deck because they don't want to reveal their card yet), the Jack of Hearts can cause the round to come back to me unfulfilled and I can then place my wish card myself.

As you can see, this is a very interesting card. The Jack of Hearts can only be neutralized and disempowered by a single card: If someone else puts his twin. the other Jack of Hearts, and thereby eliminates my wish and puts his own in the first place. Sometimes almost certain victories can be prevented by this.

Queen of Hearts:

If someone puts out the Queen of Hearts and the direct neighbor also has a Queen of Hearts, the next player in the row must take 10 cards from the deck!

This can be a big nuisance, but also an advantage, depending on which hand results. Especially at the beginning of the game you don't have to worry about this. You can use it as a strategic move at the beginning, because you might have received a rather unspectacular hand.

If you already have both Heart Queens in your hand, you can lay them at the same time and either annoy or delight your neighbor with them. Depending on. At the end of the game, however, this is no longer a lucky card shot. One has to fear to sit on the many cards or at least not to leave the game first.

King of Hearts:

Exactly the same as with the Queen of Hearts.

Ten of Hearts:

If you put out a Ten of Hearts, all players at the table must draw one card from your hand in turn.

Only a player who also has a Ten of Hearts can shorten this event or does not have to draw a card himself. If the player who holds the same Ten of Hearts is the last to draw, the other players are out of luck. If the player with an own Ten of Hearts (as defense) is next to the player who first laid the Ten of Hearts, all other players benefit from this move and nobody has to draw a card anymore. The move is then neutralized.

You can win particularly elegantly if you play with 4 players, have only three cards left in your hand and nobody had a Ten of Hearts to defend themselves against. The disappointed and surprised cries of the other players are still a sheer joy for those who have won this way. Of course, the others are frustrated.

Aces:

If you have more than one ace in your hand, you can ring in an "Ace round". You play the ace in a color that is already on the table and say out loud: "Ace round!" If you have only two Aces in your hand, you will dissolve the round as soon as it's your turn again with the phrase "Ace round dissolved". If you have more than one Ace, the round continues until you have played all of them.

During a current round, all other players must place an Ace. If a player has none, he must draw a card from the deck. A second round can also be opened during a current round if another player also has aces. You can annoy the Ace-less players very nicely with it. After all, there are eight Aces in the game.

Often this move is the only defense if you have a lot of cards and run the risk of being the last to leave the game if the other players have a lot less cards with them. Or if you're afraid that a player who only has two cards will want to use a Jack of Hearts or another "mean card". The Jack of Hearts, like all other Jacks, is less effective the more players there are. If you play in pairs, the Jack of Hearts is the killer at the end, unless the other player also has a Jack of Hearts.

My man often says to me, "Jack of Hearts victories are dishonorable victories."
You should bring this Jack into play joyfully if it's a hot game, but keep it less for safety until the end. There he is truly wasted.

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^{"Children play with deep absorption and fascination. Mathematicians are entirely lacking in seriousness-they don't give a hoot in hell whether what they're doing has any pracical application. They work on interesting puzzles and elegant and bautiful solutions to those puzzles. Musicians make series of interesting notes on instruments. What does any group of people like to do when they don't have to do anything? As far as I can tell, people get together and do something rhythmic-they dance, sing and play games. Even in playing dice, there's a wonderful rhythm to shaking the cup and rolling the dice out on the table. Or dealing cards in poker. Or knitting. ... And what's it all about? Does it really mean anything? Does it go anywhere? Fundamentally, the world is a play." Quote by Alan Watts Out of your Mind"*}

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Nines:

As I said, you change direction with the Nines. We've often seen two players holding a lot of Nines having a nice little round of 2 (with a number of other players) and constantly tossing their nines back and forth, so the others had a forced break. If you then combine this with Eights, you may not get rid of a card until many moves later, if you yourself were not involved in this little intimate interplay. But it's often the case that the Nines and Eights are well distributed in the game and you then take revenge on the lay-ups with Eights.

What is so special about these extended rules?

It's more fun! It's more excitement! It's harder to win easily. It has more variety.

First of all, the game is elongated. It doesn't matter if you play with 2 or 4 players, there is more than a good chance that you will play through the whole deck and even if the deck has been used up completely, the cards that have been put up face up on the pile will have to be shuffled again. Only the last facing up card will stay there, the rest goes into a new deck. This is where luck (or bad luck) begins all over again!

My man and I played sometimes up to three decks and still didn't finish. It gets really exciting to play this way.

Upcoming picture of the future: Us playing there with 80 something. Gives me a smile to have this vision of a common passion even at high age. There's something to it: to have a mutual hobby which seems important for couples.

We didn't know it before, of course, but experience shows that this game is still an excellent mix of luck and strategy. Neither can the game be manipulated by strategic moves alone, nor is it just a matter of luck. That's what makes it so appealing. When using only 32 cards, I have the impression that luck plays a bit more of a role. That makes it a little less interesting in my eyes. Since our variant has more cards with a special meaning, it also results in more interesting moves.

It has been shown that the Queen of Hearts and the King of Hearts are used much more frequently by four players, as you play them much more lightly than if you only play a little game with two players. Except if I use the card strategically at the beginning (with only 2 players), it can really make you crazy if you play it in a game with 4 players, and sometimes you receive it two or three times and want to scream or kill your neighbor!

Bluffing is also a popular strategy.

For example, I can use a Jack to wish for a color that I don't even have myself, because the wish often doesn't come true anyway (with four players, with two it's inevitable). So I have often misled my fellow players. Since I don't use the strategy all the time, but only randomly, my fellow players can't see through me. They can only guess if I am bluffing.

At the Ten of Hearts I forbid my man, if he has to draw a card from me, to touch a card first, to investigate my reaction and to decide for or against this card on the basis of a treacherous sign on my part. He must now draw the card, whether or not he finds out whether I prefer to keep it. So sometimes I just look somewhere else so he can't interpret me, but I have to be careful which card he actually pulls out of my hand.

Previously I had managed to bluff him a few times if I pretended that the card he was drawing from me hurt me, but was in fact an insignificant card. But most of the time I couldn't, so I introduced this extra rule to give him no advantage.

We always play this game with the teenagers (his son and girlfriend) and never get enough of it. It's as entertaining as it is stimulating and we never get bored.

When you play, you often get to know each other in a completely different way than when you just talk to each other.

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^{As he (Giacomo Casanova) spent time moving through the high society of 18th century Europe, Casanova played numerous games of chance. Anyone who's glanced at his memoirs should know that he had a passion for gambling, and these pursuits included the following: faro, whist, quinze, biribi, primero, piquet, lotteries, and basset. While he would've no doubt been smitten with poker, it should be noted that today's most popular card game didn't debut in its current form until the century following his death.}

^{At the age of 20, he chose to pursue the life of a professional gambler. According to his memoirs, "I had to earn my living in one way or another, and I decided on the profession of gamester."}

^{Well, that certainly took the fun mostly out of it from a perspective to make a living. But I guess Casanova liked it that way, even when he was indeed good at complaining to be poor at the end of his life. Source}

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Playing cards is a long tradition in my family and I got to know and love it from my brothers. There is a Russian card game that I might introduce to you sometime soon.

On the basis of the classic as well as the changed Mau Mau rules I created my own card game a few years ago.

I painted a blank deck of cards and took other symbols instead of the usual game card symbols of the characters: Fire, water, earth and air.

With this, rounds could be opened with the respective element. I really spent some nice hours creating motifs. It was during our three-week holiday in Denmark. I sat there in our dining and living room completely surrounded by glass and painted the motifs on the cards with pens. It was so much fun and creative work, which got a significant development in the hours I did it. In the beginning, my motifs were still quite dilettante and not very imaginative, but as time went by they became more and more sophisticated and in love. All motives I draw from memory and how I interpreted the elements. Above at the top and here you see a selection of them:

As you can see, they are not perfect. And the color of the pen blurs over time on the smooth card surface. But nothing is for eternity and it was great pleasure to paint the cards and spend hours of the day or evening working on them.

I hope, I was able to inspire you to do your own projects and creations with what the world offers you as "already done". But when you take a closer look it often enough is not done yet, neither couldn't be changed in the way you like it better.

Have a good weekend, all of you.

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photo-sources: erh.germany

Copyright of my card game invention: all rights reserved. If you intend to copy my card game, give me notice. I would appreciate cooperation. Thank you.

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Just some other cards I played with drawing my version of Kings and Queens :)

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