Tick

Anne showed me a new card game this weekend.  It was called "Tick", and was something she played with her usual canasta group when less than four players showed up.  The basic idea was: use two decks of cards, then play hands or 3 cards with 3s wild, 4 cards with 4s wild, up to 13 cards with Kings wild, then back down from K to 3 again.  Cards count as face value (2 to 13) with Aces being 21.  If you manage to go out, you score -25, otherwise, lay off what you can and score the rest as positive points.  Lowest score wins.

To go out, you need to play straight flushes or X-of-a-kind, with the wildcards and jokers.  It's a long, drawn-out kind of rummy, but it's interesting how some card counts are harder to get rid of.  Getting rid of the hands of 5 and 8 are tough, since you need runs of 4 or 5, with one card left to discard.  With 13 cards, you usually have 2 or 3 wilds.  When one player goes out, the other players have one more turn to clear out as much as they can.  Coming back down from the big hands to the small ones has a funny feel to it, like there are cards missing.  And it's easy to forget which card is wild and accidentally discard one.  Anne say they always kid each other when that happens and let the player take it back.  It might help to have a set of 3 to K from a third deck on the table, so you can show which hand you're on.

After that, we played a round of 500 Rummy at the newly-delivered little patio set out under the new gazebo.  That's an all-around classic game, with so many things to look at and calculate.  We're probably using a few house rules here and there, but that's part of the fun.  We sometimes agree to allow "roundabout straights" like K-A-2, but we didn't think of it today.  We usually don't bother keeping score -- it's just fun throwing cards and going out, and dealing new hands.  But I won the Tick game by over 100 and Anne won the 500 Rummy game by over 100.

For all the complexity of modern games, sometimes it's nice to just grab a deck of cards and some lemonade and sit out in the fresh air somewhere.