Grandma's Game

I grew up playing cards. Like many children I learned how to play Go Fish and Old Maid at a young age. When we played Old Maid, we didn’t use specialty cards, we used a standard deck, removed the Queen of Diamonds and let the Queen of Spades be the Old Maid. We didn’t, ironically, use the joker. For some reason, it always had to be the Queen of Spades.

Maybe because we also learned how to play Hearts. In that card game, the Queen of Spades is the highest scoring card, and also the one no one wants.

As I grew older, but still a child, I learned a flurry of other card games – Rummy (a few variations), Hearts, Crazy Eights, Kings-in-the-Corner, Solitaire, Poker, Blackjack, Tripoli, Nerds, Bullshit, Fan Tan, Muggins and Euchre (three variations, including Bid Euchre). I’m pretty sure I played Cribbage, too, but that one I have forgotten. When I was in seventh grade, my friends Glenn, Todd, Jeff and I used to play Euchre every day at lunch.

But as a child, we had a special card game that I learned from Vivian, my dad’s mother. We played it every holiday and at every other occasion we could talk her into playing. This was a big family act. Everyone would play, and it was a simple enough card game for my younger sister and I to play just as competently as everyone else. Plus, my grandmother let us keep the pennies we played with. Yes, we could also use poker chips, but playing with pennies was far more fun for a young child.

I don’t know where my grandmother learned the game, but her mother – my great-grandmother Leta – also played with us, as she always spent her holidays with us. Since Leta came from a family of card players herself, it is quite possible she taught her daughter the game.

Here’s how it goes:

It requires two decks of cards shuffled together.

Everyone puts a penny in the “kitty.” The dealer shuffles. (I also learned how to riffle shuffle at a young age. My sister and I practiced it until we got it and quickly became proficient. Grandma Eckman was proficient at this, but pretended she didn’t know how to do it. She mostly used the overhand shuffle.)

The dealer distributes five cards to each player, who lays them out face up in a line. The best poker hand wins the kitty.

That’s the first part of the game.

The next part is a kind of redistribution of wealth. The dealer turns over the first card. Let’s say it is a Five of Diamonds. “Five puts in one,” dealer says. This means that every other player who has a Five of any suit in her hand must add a penny to the kitty. The dealer than turns over the second card—such as a Queen of Hearts—and says, “Queen puts in two.” All players with a queen in their hands must add two pennies to the kitty. This goes on through five.

Following this is the inverse. The dealer turns over a card, say a Nine of Spades and says, “Nine takes out one.” Any player with a nine of any suit in his hand then retrieves one penny from the kitty. The dealer continues in the same way as the “puts in” step, only by calling “takes out” for four additional cards—i.e. through five.

Sometimes the kitty runs out of pennies. When this happens, the dealer must boost it with pennies from his own personal stash.

The final step of the card game has the dealer turn over one card at a time on a count: first card = “one;” second card = “two;” third card = “three;” and so on up to “thirteen.” When the card matches the count—for example a Seven of Clubs on “seven,” then every player except the dealer adds that number of pennies to the kitty.

At the end of this section, the dealer then collects what has been deposited in the kitty. This is the end of the hand, and the deal then goes to the person on the left.

In our family, we played this game for hours.