Card Sharp

This is Eliza.   She is ten.  She is my niece.  (Well, technically, she is my great-niece.  I try to forget that part because if she is my great-niece, that turns me into her great-aunt and that turns me into my Great Aunt Celia- my grandmother’s sister- which turns me into…)

…Anyway back to Eliza.  Recently she and I shared a car back seat all the way up to Eagle River, Wisconsin.  And since it was a seven hour drive, she came prepared with a backpack filled with things to do.

For the first hour so or so, Eliza kept busy herself playing games on the iPad.  She seemed pretty engrossed.

But curiosity got the better of her seatmate and I couldn’t help peeking.

And what she was doing was pretty cool.

She was playing this.

The Logos Game.

Have you ever played this?  The game we played features famous logos that are covered by four squares.  You can uncover one square and guess and then you get points depending on how many squares you need to uncover in order to make a correct guess.

There is an anagram of letters at the bottom of each logo that spells out its name, too.  But there are extra letters added just to confuse you.

Believe it or not, this is not as easy as it sounds.  I got the Starbucks logo and the United Airlines logo and the Google logo right away.

But this one had me stumped.

Hard to believe, right?  But cover up the bottom and just show a red upper left corner and I was confused for a long time.

After two hours of guessing, I was getting a name brand headache.   I had to beg off.

But then Eliza asked me a question.

“Aunt Ellen, do you want to play a card game?”

“Sure,” I said, happy to stop staring at the iPad.

“It’s called ‘Sleeping Queens.’  Have you ever played it before?” asked Eliza innocently as she brought out a cardboard box and fanned out the deck of cards with all the skills of a Las Vegas blackjack dealer.

“Nope,” I said.  “You’ll have to teach it to me.”

Eliza’s eyes lit up.

“Don’t worry.  I can show you how to play.  I’ll teach you all the rules.”

Hmmm.

Have you ever played this game?  You see there’s a Rose Queen and a Cat Queen and a Dog Queen (but you can’t have the Cat and Dog Queens together because cats and dogs don’t get along) and there are number cards and picture cards with Jesters and Knights and Dragons and wands and sleeping potions and some of the cards can steal your queen and some can stop the other player from stealing your queen and some cards can get a queen back for you and the knight card can slay your dragon card- or is it the other way around or…???

And the player with the most points at the end wins.

“Got all that?” asked Eliza.  “Let’s play. I’ll deal.”

What followed was pretty ugly.

Every time I drew a queen (good) Eliza already had something- a wizard, a wand, an unicorn, a knight, a rose, a bicycle, something, in her hand that could snag it.

Sometimes this included some ” Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe” counting if she happened to draw the jester.

Sometimes it was some new rule about the Rose Queen that she had neglected to tell me.  Or my sleeping potion card had run out of strength.  Or my Dragon Card had just been put under a spell by her Wand Card.

Every time I wanted to poach one of her queens, Eliza always had a “Get Out Of The Dungeon Free” card in her hot little hand.

The rules were constantly shifting but Eliza kept protesting her innocence anytime I complained.  No matter how I cried foul, she would patiently say that she had explained that rule about Rose Queen twenty minutes ago.

“But I didn’t know she had special properties!”  I said.

But Eliza would bat her big brown eyes at me and swear on a stack of Barbies that she had told me all about that rule at the beginning of her tutorial.

At the end of the game, Eliza counted up the ponts.

I had 63.

She had 97.

“Want to play another hand?” asked Maverick.

“Nope, I know when I’m licked.”

“But Eliza, want to play Trivial Pursuit?”