at the manor — Bonnie Landry

originally published March 14, 2012

We have had a pretty exciting couple of days at the manor. Firstly, Rosebud learned to read. Yes! She read Hop on Pop to Whiteface, our cat. It took two days, because it was such hard work. It was hard because it was her first reading of a significant literary work. And also because Whiteface isn't all that interested in being read to, regardless of the quality of literature. So, a book that could be read in say, fifteen minutes if you are five years old can take quite a bit longer if have to keep chasing the cat down to sit on your lap.

Now that she can read, she wants to play Boggle with me. Which is interesting. We give her the brand new reader handicap, that whatever word she comes up with, so long as it is phonetically reasonable, is a word. Like, ded and sipt.

She has taught me a new game, which she made up, now that she can read her skill level in many areas is blossoming, apparently. So I am going to teach you the game so that you can play it with your children. Please feel free to change the rules. Rosebud does.

So, the goal of the game is to get rid of all your cards.
The most difficult part of them game is that you must obtain a deck of cards exactly like the ones we have which depict horses of various breeds, and more importantly, various colours. This is tantamount to the success of the game.

This is a two player game. Each player gets nine cards. Nine.
Youngest goes first.
The rest of the cards go in a pile in the middle.
Each player takes turns flipping over one card per turn.

They take note of the colour of horse on the card, write on their score card (a piece of scrap paper) the colour category.

The card then goes into the discard pile.
Players write down the different colour categories as they turn over each card from the pile.

Once a colour category has been made, for example; blackish-brown, brown, orange-brown, black, beige, white, spotted and neopolitan, it is tallied every time a player flips over a card from the pile that belong to one of the aforementioned categories.

At this point in the game, mothers sometimes impose limits to the categories of colours. Such as spotted has to be just "spotted", not black with a white spots and grey with black spots and grey with white spots and "brownish black" must be just that and not brownish black with black legs and mane or with black line down the back, or blackish brown should the picture be of a horse leaning more towards the black genre, but not quite. You can see where the game could potentially last nine hours instead of one and a half hours.

When it appeared that no more rules were forthcoming, I inquired as to the object of the game. If the object was to get rid of our cards, and the first player to get rid of their cards wins, if we sit with nine cards in our hands the entire time, no one will ever win. Ah, Rosebud is not sure where to go with this revelation.

So I naively suggest that whenever a player flips four in any one colour category, they unload all of that particular colour that they hold in their hand. Did not realize that 85% of the deck was brown. Or brownish black, depending on your highly subjective opinion.

I wish I was making this up.

At any rate, I won. Lucky me! I don’t know how that happened. Rosebud was happy that I caught on so quickly. What I caught onto quickly was to not let her decide what colour category the horses belonged to. Once a category was decided, I simply announced which category a card went in.

OFFICIAL SCORECARD