Nerts

This is the name of probably one of the most chaotic card games I've ever played in my life!

Last night Sally and Asher Barrett and Danielle Gawronski came over to play games. The Barretts wanted to teach us their favorite game of all time... Nerts. It is madness! Each player gets an entire deck of cards. You count out 13 in one stack with the top card up and set out 4 cards face up to the side of that stack. The stack is called the Nerts stack. You proceed to play solitaire on the 4 cards drawing only every third card out of the remaining pile of cards. Each time you have the opportunity, you play the top card off the nerts pile. The object of the game is to get rid of the Nerts stack (each leftover card is worth 2 pts). Now here is where the madness begins, the way you score points in by playing the center stacks. How this works is when anyone has an Ace they place it in the center and all the players can play on that card adding the same type and color card to the stack- it's a race really to get your card on the stack before the other players do. For every card you have out in the center you get 1 pt. Still doesn't sound that ridiculous yet?.... well imagine having 5 players, each player has 4 aces, which means that at any time you may have 20 stacks of cards in the center you are trying to watch and move your cards to, while playing your own game of solitaire, and trying to be the first one to call NERTS! The game is over at that point and you count how many nerts cards you still have (4 cards would be -8 pts) and count how many you actually got out in the center. You play until one player reach 100. The first game I ended with an incredible final score of 1 pt. and by the second game I think I made it to 34. I'm not a fan of chaos so every couple minutes I lost all train of thought and couldn't stop thinking about how I really wanted to organize the stacks in the center.

It was really fun though. I hadn't seen the Barretts or Danielle in ages and it was great to be able to catch up and chat about our lives and all. Time is passing too quickly....