Page 1

# of Players: 2 to 5
Equipment Needed: Deck of playing cards (jokers optional)
Time per Game: 2-5 minutes
Age Group: 5+

My mom and dad taught my sister and me how to play this game when we were little. I think it was my dad's way to feed his hunger for the card game Bridge with his little kids. My sister liked it so much that she was willing to give up a Saturday afternoon ice skating outing to extend her Friday evening bedtime and play a few more games (I chose ice skating). Now, I've taught it to my son and one of his friends who doesn't like every game but latched onto Page 1 during our lake vacation last summer.

Every player is dealt 5 cards from the deck and can look at his cards (but doesn't share them with others). The next card in the deck is turned face up, and the rest of the deck remains face down in a draw pile. Everybody looks at the face up card (let's suppose it's the 5 of hearts) and tries to play a card from his hand that matches its suit (hearts, in this example). If a player doesn't have any cards of that suit in his hand, he must take cards from the draw pile until obtaining one that matches. Once each person plays a card of that suit, then all of the played cards are moved into a discard pile. The person who played the highest ranking card then picks the next card to play face up from his hand, and the other players must match its suit with a card from their hands (and take cards from the draw pile if they cannot).

The object of the game is to get rid of all the cards in your hand. When you have just 1 card remaining, you must announce "Page 1" aloud to give the others a heads-up that you're close to the finish. When you play your last card, you announce "Stop" and win, and the cards can be shuffled for another game if desired.

A few additional points about the game:

• Aces are high in this game, and if you're playing with jokers, those count as a trump card that can match any suit and always is the highest card.
• If all the cards in the draw pile have been picked, you can shuffle the cards in the discard pile and then turn them over as a fresh draw pile.
• There's obviously a little strategy in terms of remembering which suits other players are missing, noting which cards in a suit have been played (so you know, for example, if your queen is the highest card remaining), and deciding when to play certain cards (for example, it's a guaranteed win if you play a joker right before declaring "Page 1").
• In our variation, you weren't required to play a matching card the moment you picked it from the draw pile. For example, if you selected a joker from the draw pile, you could hold onto it for a later time in the game.
• Sometimes a game can get tediously long when the suits are not evenly distributed (for example, one player holds almost all the hearts, another holds almost all the spades, each forces the other to keep drawing from the pile, and the problem only gets worse). In those situations, it's sometimes best just to call the game a draw and start a new one.