Card Games

The Game of Life Adventures. UNO. Monopoly Deal. Aside from game consoles, card games are the next in line to be good portable means of recreation. Not to mention it only takes minutes to play with about 98% chance of shuffling cards and playing another round, give or take the addition of a few people.

Kai has been harping me to get Monopoly Deal for the two of us for some time, and this would be the reason why we frequent visiting shops like Toy Kingdom, Toys R Us and Hobbes & Landes to search for it. For some weeks, they were all out of stock, and we settled for purchasing other games instead.

Luckily, they were good calls because the first two buys turned out for he better, with good statistics of replayability whenever we got together every weekend. Earlier today, I was commuting home and decided to pass by the Toy Kingdom at SM Makati to check on the Kamen Rider and Sentai merchandise. I decided to go to the other side of the store towards the mass of board games where the boxes of card games hung. Much to my surprise, I skimmed the game titles and came across MONOPOLY DEAL! Eagerly, I got it, and now we have a nice array of card games to choose from and bring along to sleepovers!

Playing Bridge

Being part of a block who has nothing better to do during their breaks besides coming together in groups of four to play card games is one great block to be in. A quartet of players, regardless who they may be, would often gather in a particular area to play one of the following games: Pusoy-Dos, Bridge or Hearts. For this entry, I'll be focusing on the game of Bridge; in particular, Mystery Bridge.

Here's a simple explanation of how the game is played. With four players, the card deck of 52 is divided equally amongst them (13 per player). Bridge is a team game, and pairs (often across one another) try to work together to gather a pile of cards enough to win the game, dependent on the bid. In Mystery Bridge, whoever wins the bid will choose a card. Whoever has that card is their partner.

For us, the bidding starts with whoever dealt the cards. To bid means to technically assign a particular suit as a 'trump', deemed highest among all other suits. On some occasions, there can be no trump, meaning that all suits are equal in value so to speak. The bidding level is alphabetical, with Clubs being the lowest, then Diamonds, then Hearts, then Spades. The highest one is No Trump.

The number of piles of cards needed by each pair is determined by the number. Normally, a bid would be "1 (insert desired suit here)". The number tends to increase until all other three players pass. If nobody made a bid, the trump would immediately be 1 No Trump.

If the bid was 1, then there will be a race to 7 piles for each pair.

If 2, the winning team needs to get 8 piles, while the other pair, 6.

If 3, the winning team needs to get 9 piles, while the other pair, 5.

If 4, the winning team needs to get 10 piles, while the other pair, 4.

If 5, the winning team needs to get 11 piles, while the other pair, 3.

Rarely does the bid go up to 5 unless the hand of a player is really good.

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Now that I've explained the game as best as I can, I'll move on to a particular game I had with my blockmates Tiff, Neil and Gie over lunch to end my blog entry. So it was our last game before we headed off to Math class. In my hand, I recall having the following cards: A, K, Q, 9, 8 and 7 of clubs and A, K and Q of diamonds among my 13 cards. I raised the bid to 3 No Trump where everybody passed. Since it was a game of Mystery Bridge, I declared that my partner would be whoever had the Ace of Spades, to which I believe I only had about one or two. So since it was a no trump game, I was the first to make a move.

And wouldn't you know it, by the end of the game, I on my own won with the mentioned cards. I exhausted the clubs and played the three highest Diamond cards and got the 9 piles all by myself. ^____________________________^v

Epic win, epic win.