“All of us against Dad? Now that was a game we could all get behind.”
When I think about playing games or gameplay, I find myself huddled around the computer, watching my big sisters or Neighbors
Play that old Commodore 64. We’d be playing Winter Games, Summer Games, California games, Frogger, Dig Dug– All on those old floppy disks. I also think about playing cards with my family. We’d play Euchre, Blackjack, Gin rummy, hearts.
And in the Summers we would really play cards. Especially when a storm would move through. My dad would take off from work so that Mom wasn’t stuck entertaining us four kids. My dad was a math whiz, with a super, super good memory. So, he was really good at cards. He loved to teach us kids how to play. I mean really play. He knew how to make small things special. So much so that my mom, who was supposed to be catching a break from us kids, would somehow always end up being dealt in to whatever it was we were playing
One rainy day, my dad called us grumpy, bored, complaining kids over to the kitchen table. And that table was set with nothing but his giant green coin jar and a deck of cards.
“Here Kids, have a seat.” He’d say “We’re gonna play Blackjack.”
“Oh, Dad! We don’t want to learn a game.” We’d chime in or something like that or be like, “let’s play something that we already know like hearts or something.”
Yeah, learning games was always kind of a hard thing especially when you got four kids, and I guess, competing values or something. I recall us trying to peg it on him and say, “You know, Dad that’s like gambling, isn’t it? Gambling is wrong!”
And he’d say something like, “Oh stop it! Just sit down. Give it a try. It could be fun.” He’d also always drop his glasses, down his nose for dramatic effect. And he, he’d say things like “Are you ready to play?” and then he’d smoothly slip into the sort of like,
Character for a given occasion. This occasion being, he’s going to be a blackjack dealer. And we decided to play a few open hands.
And he’d say, “All right. This is what a typical deal looks like.” And he would whip those cards around the table and he would quickly show us what we were working towards by dealing us all of our cards. For blackjack, he’d put two cards face up.
I remember one of us saying “Dad, why are you playing an open hand?”
And he’d say, “I’m the dealer, so while I always have one card up, one card down, and you. Are all against me. You need to beat me–the house.”
All of us against Dad? Now that was a game we could all get behind.
