Thanksgiving
Chicks Rule
A card game:
A game to play with Tarot cards.
A minimal ruleset was sought. We got it down to 10.
1) Play with a Tarot deck, and 4 or 6 players, in teams of 2, with partners sitting opposite one another.
2) Deal all the cards down, with the extras left as a "kitty."
3) Play for tricks, where the high card of the suit led (or trump card) wins each hand, and the winner leads the next hand.
4) If (and only if) you cannot follow the suit led, you may play any card in your hand.
5) A Tarot deck has a fifth suit ordinarily called trump. (...or the "major arcana," if you're majorly into Tarot) Chicks Rule has a variable trump suit that changes from hand to hand, so for clarity we simply renamed the fifth suit "bettys" to distinguish it from trump.
6) Before play begins, players bid, naming the quantity of tricks, and the suit they'd declare as trump. Suits are (in order) bettys, spades hearts, diamonds, clubs and "no trump." There is a suit order (only) to distinguish between two numerically equivalent bids: 5 no trump is an incrementally higher bid than 5 clubs.
7) The bid winner picks up the kitty, and discards an equal number of cards from his/her hand. No one else sees these cards.
8) Chicks rule. (Meaning, in this game, the Dame or Queen card outranks the Rex or King)
9) A Tarot deck has a card called the "fool." In this game, it is renamed the Nymph, and is the top trump: the most powerful card in the deck. If the hand is being played with "no trump," the Nymph reverts to a betty, albeit the highest one. (If your deck has a "universe" card and it has a chick on it, you can use that one for the Nymph instead of the Fool.)
10) If the team that won the bidding takes as many tricks as they proposed to, they score that many points. More tricks don't add points, (so it pays to bid all you can) but if too few tricks are taken, the opposing team accrues the value of the contract. To save time, teams on the defense can confer openly and elect to simply concede the balance of a hand.
"Chicks Rule!" was developed in a single night of extreme frustration in Los Barilles, Baja California. With no wind, numerous injuries and too much alcohol, a small team of engineers turned to nonstop cards to pass the time. After Bridge, Tarot, Rook, Hearts and War were exhausted, we tried to come up with a game that did not contain arbitrary rule baloney of Tarot, or the scoring complexity of Bridge, but retained team play and complex bidding strategy. Additional commentary on the rules is solicited but please keep in mind our intent to keep the rules very simple. Chess has simple rules with complex and interesting consequences, we hope this game does, too, and will try to keep it that way. This is the only legitimate source of adjudication for Chicks Rule, and all changes are subject to editorial review by the founding team of Marc, Guy, Trina, Peter, Robert and Mark. If you like Chicks Rule!, please send us lots of money.
Some simple notes on the Tarot deck for the uninitiated:
a) There's no Ace. There's a one, but it's low.
b) The "face cards" sometimes have letters to identify them: V,C,R,D (Standing for the words Val-yea, Cheval-yea, Rex and Dame, with aplogies to whatever the actual French pronunciation is supposed to be. Or, in the vernacular of the game, chump, chump on a horse, dude and Chick.)
c) Keep in mind the major arcana suit (the one with all the pictures) has 21 cards in it, instead of 13, so if that suit ends up trump, it's a long one.
d) It's easier to play if you write the numbers on the upper left corner of each card. Or, buy a more "conventional" looking deck that's laid out that way. (Impossible in Boulder.)
Stargazing
The biggest telescope was 8' long, had a custom homemade wooden base to hold it's heavy base mirror. Varnished to a creamy yellow, it screamed of pride and retro-tech. (length to width ratio approximates a familiar object nicley: Freud, anyone?) There were a dozen such telescopes, aimed into the unknown with icy distain. Kids wandered with hot chocolate. Cheerful conversation. Braggadocio when two telescope people talked, simplistic paternal enumeration of the constellations when one spoke to a civilian at the head of his little line. Ask the right question and you might get to see the laser in operation!
Then the moment of truth. Patiently waiting, hearing four times over that "it's actually a triple star, very rare," I reach the front of the line and peer into the little tube. Hard at first to hold my eye still, & waiting for the lissajous figures to hold still after I bumped it. There they are! Dots. Just two. But I know, 'cause I've heard the patter 4x: "the last one's at 2:00 o'clock from the upper one, very close, and very dim." Ok! there it is! Three dots. Ok, who's next?
That's the trouble with skygazing, for me. Still just dots.
We saw a globular cluster (bunch a dots so far and close together they were blurry) and a comet (same blur, different object, this one 2 miles wide and hurtling straight at us, or was it a smudge.)
I actually had one very cool astronomical observance, For two weeks, comet something or other (Not Kouhoutek, that one always disappointed, maybe it was Hale-Bopp?) approached Virginia at Christmas time. Do you remember it? Just a smudge, really, 2" long between your fingers, it was so much less light than everything else manmade, it was hard to get excited. But it was there every night, and if you were in a dark place, it really was something. It gave off an aura of motion and speed somehow, though it held perfectly slow, it's motion against the starfield had to be measured overnight. You got the feeling this strange alien was implacable, enormous. And alien is a bad choice: there was no sense of aliveness. This was the clockwork of the galaxy, on display, operating wtihout transistors or unleaded gasoline. It would come by again, later, when all we protoplasm are reduced to the next cold sticky layer of black oil buried deep somewhere and the earth's a frozen rock. It wouldn't notice us, then ...or now.
There was a sense of wonder.
I often wanted a telescope. It was a cool instrument. But even then, as a kid, I realized that after saturn, and the orion nebula, what you had up there was mostly just dots. A sophomoric view but I hold it still