Blog Number 193

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

It now has been over one month since we canceled our satellite tv.  We have watched a few movies from the library with the kids (most recently the A&E version of Jane Eyre) but for the most part we have been sans tv for the entire month.  As I have mentioned before, we have discovered a love of card and board games, especially Uno.  So much so that a friend of mine from Sunday School actually blamed me for his family wanting to play more games.  He did so in jest but it is neat that it is catching on.

Uno is one of those games that can require strategy but has enough luck that the 5 year old can join in.  I discovered a site recently devoted to alternate rules for Uno so we have been adding a few here and there.  As the variations that we use pile up the game hardly resembles the original one as outlined in the rule book.  Tonight we played our most complex variation yet...

• Anytime someone plays a 7, they have an option to trade hands with any other player
• Anytime someone plays a 2, they then immediately give 2 cards from their hand to the player who follows them
• Anytime someone plays a 0, everyone trades hands with the player next to them in the direction the play is currently going
• Anytime someone plays a Draw Two, the next player can pile on another Draw Two thereby making the next player Draw Four (or he can add another Draw 2 making the next player Draw Six, etc).
• The player who goes first for the hand gets to choose how many cards we start with (from 5 to 10)

We added these rules one at a time over the last few playing sessions otherwise it would be too confusing.  We did try adding one more rule for the last few hands tonight.

• Naked Uno - Each player plays with his/her cards all facing up so everyone can see what everyone else has and play accordingly

This variation involves some strategy, especially if you play with all the above variations too (which we did).  One problem with all these rules is that you can end up with LOTS of cards in your hand and if the hand (the one attached to your wrist) is small (like, say my son's or daughter's) then it is quite hard to hold all the cards and the wife and I are forever fanning the cards out for them.  In one hand tonight after a few brutal turns, my son's hand looked like this...

He had close to 20 cards.  After he played a 7 though he passed them on to someone else (and breathed a sigh of relief).  Such is the life of an Uno hand, who knows who will end up with the big pile?  There are lots of other variations that we will try out soon so I will keep you posted.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon