Spoons

Spoons

Equipment:       deck of cards

                        Tablespoons (one less than the number of people playing)

Monday night in our house is family night!  After the supper dishes are done, we gather the children together and get ready for some family fun.  Usually we have some sort of lesson (more on that at a later date).  We always have a treat.  And we often will play a game or have some sort of activity planned.  This past Monday night we played one of our favorite card games – Spoons.  This is a card version of musical chairs.  The object of the game is to be the last man standing (figuratively).  Start off by laying the spoons in the middle of the table.  (There are seven in our family, so we laid out six spoons.)  The dealer deals four cards to each player.  The person seated on the right of the dealer is designated the trash can.  You can hold no more than five cards at a time.  The object is to get four of a kind.  The first person to get four of a kind grabs a spoon, and then everyone else tries to grab one of the remaining spoons.  To start the round, the dealer picks up a card from the deck, and if it is one that can help him towards getting four of a kind, he keeps it.  If not, he passes it to the person on the left, who then also looks at the card and decides whether to keep it or not.  The dealer keeps looking at cards, deciding to keep them or pass them on to the next player.  The trash can is in charge of keeping the cast offs in a pile.  (Try to keep the cards moving along fairly quickly to keep the pace of the game going well.)  As soon as a player has four of a kind, they grab a spoon and the mayhem starts.  The person who didn’t get a spoon is eliminated.  The dealer gathers up the cards, while the spoons (minus one) are laid on the table again.  The game is over when the last two players are finished their round.  (Hints: Some people don’t bother looking at their cards, they just keep an eagle eye on the spoons, so they can get a jump on the rest of the players.  If you’re sneaky, you can slowly reach out and grab a spoon with no one noticing for a while, this is kind of fun!  Some people sweep the spoons off the table when they reach out and grab their spoon, this causes all kinds of trouble!)