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Best Family Card Games

Some of the card games I played with my family in the 1920s and beyond have stood the test of time. Some of these same games I have found my grand children playing. I don't remember when I played them specifically but they are games I have always known about.

Go Fish is a game I've played when I grew up in South Dakota on the prairie.
Crazy Eight is another simple child's game the kids still play. Old Maid and Flinch were favorites as a small child.

Cribbage is as popular today as it was in the 1920s I believe. If you don't know the game and listen to others' counting up their scores, it doesn't make a lot of sense and I thought I could never learn to play such a difficult card game, but once you learn how, it's really quite simple. It is played with a board, using pegs to score points as you play the game. The first player to get his pegs around to Home is the winner. This game is played with a deck of 52 without the joker.

My favorite game of all time is Whist. When my parents taught me how to play that game I had watched the grownups play every winter, I thought I had finally grown up when I learned how to play Whist. The classic game is a plain-trick game for four players who play partners. The partners sit facing each other and it is played clockwise. A standard 52-pack is used. The cards in each suit rank from highest to lowest: AKQJ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2.

The cards are shuffled and the dealer deals out all the cards one at a time; each player has 13 cards. There are several versions of this game, but the one I know is as follows:

Each player puts a card face down in front of him, a black one if you think you can take at least seven tricks, a red one if you don't have too many Aces or face cards and you think you can't take at least seven tricks. The red card stands for Neula. Turn those over starting with the first player. If they are all red, you play to lose tricks. The first one who turns over a black card is Granding, and he and his partner try to take seven tricks, the other couple tries to set them by taking tricks. The score is the tricks you take over 7. If you don't take seven tricks, you score zero and the other couple scores however many tricks over seven they are able to take.

Continue dealing out the cards and play another hand until one of the couples score 13. Then the game is over when one of the couples reaches 13.

Since this game was played a lot in the 18th and 19th centuries, I think I can say the game has stood the test of time along with many others.

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