Just Thinkin’

Help! We’re addicted we are! We just can’t stop playing UNO!

It’s all my (almost) son-in-law’s fault. It’s become a family tradition of sorts that every Sunday we head up to the upstairs apartment (our second floor) to have dinner with my lady’s youngest son and his family and after dinner we usually play one of the many board games we have kicking around. It’s amazing how many of these games one can acquire in a lifetime so there is always a good variety to choose from. Now everything was going well, just a dinner and a game is all, so what’s the big deal here? Well nothing really, as long as we stuck to those silly board games everything was just peachy but then came that fateful evening when her son dropped an UNO deck on the table and none of us has been the same since.

Now anyone who’s really played UNO before will probably verify this when I say that this particular card game has to be one of the most addicting card games in existence that isn’t played with a standard deck of playing cards. Especially if you play by backyard rules. Even more so if you play by cutthroat rules but I can’t seem to talk them into that. It’s the ultimate "screw your neighbor with a smile" card game and once you start playing you just…can’t…stop. Now I don’t mean we’re doing all night marathons or anything like that, it’s just one game on Sunday night. One game that has been lasting an average of 4 hours a piece and every time we play we tell ourselves that we’ll play something else the next Sunday but it just doesn’t happen that way. Out comes the UNO deck and we’re off on another 4 hour stretch.

We play by those "backyard rules" you see. The same type of rules can apply in  a game of horseshoes. If everyone played by regulation horseshoe play, the game wouldn’t be any fun for your average backyard horseshoe player so most domestic horseshoe games go by backyard rules meaning; no pits are built and "leaners" and "sliders" always count. In UNO it basically means that you can play your wild cards anytime you want rather than having to save them until you run out of the color you wish to play. This makes the game much more fun and apparently longer lasting as well. Cutthroat rules add the ability to use your "Draw 2" cards in succession which basically means you don’t want to be on the receiving end of a 4 player "Draw 2" run and end up having to pick up 8 cards. I like playing that way but they won’t hear of it.

So here it is Sunday again and we’re scheduled for dinner at 5:30 this evening and this time Laurie and I are bringing something to the game…A genuine original UNO dual bin card holder circa 1982. That’s 25 years old! A genuine UNO antique if I ever saw one. Okay, it’s still a piece of black plastic but still…

Now my (almost) son-in-law won’t go mental every time someone doesn’t place a card on the discard pile in a neat and orderly fashion. One of these days we might actually play something else…but not quite yet I’m afraid. At least not until I get them to play one cutthroat game.

There’s no point or purpose to this post for those of you wondering where this bit of silliness is going, it’s just something I felt like writing about which is the whole beauty of having a personal blog isn’t it?  I can sit here on a Sunday afternoon with a whole world of controversy raging about like it normally does and write up an absolutely meaningless post about our Sunday night UNO game simply because I wish to. Ain’t life grand though?

Have a nice dinner.

Tags: writing

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