Playing word games with a full deck

I love playing cards.

I mean I love the cards known for playing.

I guess I do also like to play with cards. Red and black, that's where it's at. Hearts, diamonds, clovers and the red balloon. Or was that Lucky Charms?

I have a special four-color deck, that made clubs green and diamonds blue. It's a minor change, but that's what's so nice. A minor change can be applied to them. The simplicity is really nice.

I do find it funny that a game known as Texas Hold ’Em has kings and queens in it, a place that is not known for that kind of rulership. That might be part of the fun for Americans. At least for a cowboy. They don't know the king of France from the queen of Spain. In our current culture, many of us—not enough of us—try to even the playing field more and more for all.

Cards have not yet become a target for cancel culture. A king beats a queen in poker, but maybe the game of chess balances that out, where queens are so powerful. The queen can get out on the board, move around, change things, get stuff done. Kings just sit there, moving a little bit, one space at a time, waiting to get captured.

Back to cards, there could be a rainbow on the table while playing card games. I feel like it would promote the ace community as well as the straight one.

I suppose it makes toilet enthusiasts happy that a flush is such a good thing.

I love that we've come up with different games, just by using these sets of 52 cards. Go Fish, Blackjack, and many more. There's a video game I played, Fallout New Vegas, that has a mini-game in it called Caravan. In the game you travel a post-apocalyptic Nevada, or as I like to call it, Nevada.

You find cards, playing cards. The rules of other games seem forgotten and lost, as well as the idea of finding a completed deck of 52. So they made up a new game. You build your own deck from any cards you find. It's a one-on-one game, using math and other rules to build your own score. The makers came up with rules that you could copy and play using cards in real life. The versatility of these cards is probably as endless as the uniqueness of a shuffled deck. That is, to avoid getting too math heavy, and delving into the 52 factorial ... the chances of a shuffled deck ever being in the same exact order as another is incredibly slim.

Normally at this point in my articles I may have a twist or a turn. Not this time.

I just like cards.

I'm known to play poker, but really, I just like to shuffle them.

I don't know any magic though. I love the art of face cards. I did draw my own face as a card once, the hex of spades. Cards are fun, you've got to hand it to them for that.

If there's one thing I'd like to tell, it’s that I hope we can raise the importance of cards and games. They can be rather cheap. Pocket change can cover a deck of cards, no check needed. We can do all kinds of things with them, because there's no limit.

It doesn't have to be cards, of course. One time, at a party, I tried to get people to play a game of Yahtzee, but no dice.

(Oliver Graves is a stand-up comic who can be followed on Instagram and Facebook, or through his website OliverGraves.com. ’Oliver’s World’ runs every-other-week in the Argus-Courier.)