My favorite card game ever is called Russian Bank.

Looks interesting. I think the closest I've come is Double Solitaire.

That is what we called double solitaire growing up. Of course, that may be because my mother didn't want to use its French name, crapette. Russian Bank sounds much nicer.

There's a great French trick-avoidance game called "Le Barbu" where each hand you pick a different objective (no tricks, no hearts, no queen, no king of hearts aka "le barbu", the bearded one, etc.) based on your hand. It takes a long time because each player has to go through all possible objectives, but it's very fun.

For rummy fans, I've had good fun with the Mystery Rummy series. Each one is based on making three-of-a-kind melds, but they all have slightly different twists. In "Jack the Ripper", meld colors are all potential suspects in the case, and there are victim cards that allow you to draw extra cards, etc. There's also "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "Jekyll and Hyde", which is for two players.

favorite card games?

Dutch Blitz!

Hey SeanK (and Laga for that matter). I picked up a 2nd controller for the 360, so if'n you get bored this summer when I'm off work, and you don't mind a messy apartment, your welcome to come over.

Introduced the houseguest to Rock Band today. Another toaster for me!

Usual Saturday gaming didn't happen due to convergence of non-geek houseguest, househunting, and conjunctivitis. Which is a shame, because we need to finish this modern-day Cthulhu-ish thing we are playing. The DM has a habit of setting Ravenloft (the original adventure) in all sorts of random settings, so I'd recently played Ravenloft as US Army during WWII.

I was sure this game was that game, starting as it did with US National Guard heading into the mountains of Kurdistan, under the command of a new Lt. with secret orders (there are always secret orders). But now I'm thinking it's some sort of ancient-Ur-Sumerian thing.

It was supposed to take 4 hours to play, so we assumed it would take us 8, but it's looking more like 15 will be the total.

Dudes. The hub is babbling at me about Wasteland again, so i signed him up and told him we have a game thread now. Also, phone posting sucks.

Does anyone like backgammon?

I like it, but I'm not good at it. Fortunately, unlike with card games, I don't care when I lose.

Favorite card games - so many. Love pinochle, clubs, hearts, spades. I know I liked euchre a lot when I learned it a decade ago, but I haven't played since, so I can't remember it anymore. Pinochle is the game we used to play marathon-style back in my twenties/early thirties.

My parents and their friends were huge bridge players, so I've dabbled, but I haven't learned bidding well at all. I should find some local bridge people and learn, though. Cards. How I love cards.

See, for some reason I hate card games. I'm not bad at them (I may be unbeaten at Canasta, in fact), but they leave me cold.

I blame bridge. I spent a lot of my pre-school days at my grandmother's, and she had a bridge group. Which meant I was banned from interacting with people and had to find ways to entertain myself; not easy in a Quaker house. Even now the idea of bridge brings back the smell of old people.

t /TMI

I don't like sandwiches either, go figure.

Huh, didn't the Earl of Sandwich invent the thing so he could eat and play cards? Maybe I've got some sort of past life issue here.

didn't the Earl of Sandwich invent the thing

yes! It's the one thing sandwiches and sushi have in common.

Except that sushi was invented so the dude could keep rolling craps (or, okay, Japanese equivalent thereof) rather than cards -- between that and the sushi, it seems just infinitely cooler somehow.

well I don't remember the sushi guy's name but Earl of Sandwich does sound unbearably stuffy.