nerts!

Last night after dinner we went over to a friend's house and played the card game, Nerts. This game is a blast! (I'll explain how to play it down below.) Thomas caught on pretty quickly and is now totally into this game. We played it a couple of times this morning after breakfast and a few more times after lunch already today. This is fun for me since I grew up playing cards and Scott is totally not a game player at all.

Elle's kind of catching onto the game. She has her little Dora cards and picks out all of the good cards to put out on the piles. Pretty cute! That's Ava under Elle's chair. She likes small spaces for some reason. :)

To play, everyone gets a deck of cards with the jokers removed. After shuffling the deck and passing it to the player to your left you place 13 cards in a pile all face down, except for the top card. The top card gets flipped face side up. This pile of cards is called your Nerts pile. Then you place 4 cards face up in a row next to the Nerts pile. Someone shouts go and then you basically just play solitaire but the twist is that you get to play on everyones aces that get put in the middle. This is when it gets crazy and the cards start flying! The object of the game is to get rid of your nerts pile first and to play as many cards out into the middle as possible. The first person who gets rid of his/her nerts pile shouts NERTS! and the game immediately stops. Everyone else counts how many cards are left in their nerts piles. This number gets subtracted from the number of cards that they played on the aces in the middle of the table during the game. The person with the highest score wins. We usually play first one to 100 points wins it all.

Learning to play cards also means learning to shuffle. He's getting it figured out and can't wait to learn how to do the bridge shuffle. Practice, practice, practice!