Peanuts Are Not Only For Eating

On Thanksgiving day my family played a game called Peanuts. This is a card game that has elements of solitaire, but there is also a speed element to it. It is also known by other names such as Pounce and Nerts.

There are several places online where you can learn how to play Peanuts. Here's one. Here's another.

Each player needs a deck of cards to play so the first thing we had to do was find grandma's stash of cards. We ended up with new slick decks, old decks that were so sticky you had to wonder where they had been, and two decks that had the same design on the back so someone differentiated between them by putting a big black slash mark on each card of one deck. This was called the Slash deck. We had one set of Scooby Doo cards which no one could read very well because they had huge pictures of the cartoon characters and tiny pictures of the suits.

Our next problem was finding a place to play. We put together two large rectangle tables to form a larger, almost square, table. This makeshift table was so large we didn't have room left for chairs, but that didn't matter anyway because everyone had to stand up in order to reach all the cards they needed to play the game.

Our family has added new rules to the game to make it more fair, since most of us like to complain that the winner must be cheating. One of the rules is that after each hand is played, everyone moves over one spot. This means that throughout a game everyone has to put up with bad table positions and also less-than-ideal decks. Before we change places, we all make sure to shuffle the deck for the next person too. None of this ever makes any difference for me. I always lose badly.

I read some of the rules online and noticed that one site says that if you get more than 5 people playing, it begins to get out of hand.

So of course my family played with 11 people.