Stephen Smith
United States
Columbus
Mississippi
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Only Game: Halli Galli
Grace asked if I would play a game with her after reading her story. She wanted to play the game with the fruits where you ring the bell. I knew exactly what she was talking about. However, it was odd given that she only played a single game several months ago. In Halli Galli, each player is dealt a hand of cards, each of which has from 1 to 5 of the same fruit pictured on it. The fruits used in the game are bananas, strawberries, plums, and pears. In order around the table, each player turns up one card at a time. When exactly five of a single type of fruit is showing, the first person to hit the bell takes all of the cards and places them beneath their stack. Once all of your cards are gone, you are out of the game. Play continues until there are only two players left. After the current stacks are taken, they count their cards, with the winner being the player with the highest total. When we are playing with two, we go until one person has no cards left.
Most of the first game was just an attempt to get Grace to turn cards over without first looking at them. This took some coaching in the proper method of drawing the card away from you rather than toward you. It took her a little while, but by the end of the third game, she was catching on. The new problem we had with her drawing like this is that she was so slow that she was actively displaying her card for quite a while before laying it down. This is not good for a game in which speed is of the essence. Fortunately, she improved on this by the end of the third game as well.
At any rate, I won the first game on one pass through the deck, which is exactly what I expected. She seemed to get as much enjoyment from me slapping the bell as anything else. This is akin to our playing of Slamwich earlier this week. At any rate, Christine asked to join the second game, so I knew I would have some competition. As it turned out, it wasn't a lot of competition. I was still much quicker than either of the two of them. One time, I was too fast and was forced to give up cards to each of them. Then Grace repeated this. Still, they both ran out of cards in their decks, leaving me in sole possession of cards. Since Christine was not interested in another game, Grace and I played a third. This time around I tried to help her a whole lot more in picking out when groups of five are on the table. Unfortunately, he is still at the point where she must count each of the fruits available instead of recognizing the pattern and proceeding from there. This kind of gives me an unfair advantage. At any rate, I was able to win this game as well.
Final Result:
Stephen -- 3 wins
As long as she likes to play for the sake of playing, I'm all for continuing. As I mentioned earlier, I was kind of surprised that she chose this game. She has not mentioned it since we played it last. At the time, I knew she liked it because of the bell-ringing aspect. She does seem to be getting better at the pattern recognition, so hopefully, her abilities in games like this will improve. Our total playing time was about 20 minutes.
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