Tag Archives: card

day 2324: life without video games. or fun with a deck of cards!



if you’re really, really old, you might recall life before video game consoles. a simpler slower, time when on gray, cold mornings you might see a deck of cards and spend hours finding different things to do with it, like building a house of cards.

i can actually recall spending many such mornings in my youth toiling away at building card houses so amusing to see odin has developed a similar interest.

this design by Odin the Engineer might look a look slap-dashed together but it’s remarkably sturdy and, most importantly, resistant to having a small collapse bring down the entire structure.



next, Odin the Engineer went on to experiment with multilevel structures which are quite challenging but no match for odin’s patience and persistence. it really is a great way to test your fine motor skills!



after hours of building card houses, Odin the Engineer invented a way to demonstrate the domino effect with cards by figuring out how to line the cards up so that they would stay standing until he tipped the first one over which would tranfer it’s energy to the next one would would tip over and transfer it’s energy to the next one and so on and so forth.



it’s quite a clever design – i think we’ll have to buy a few more decks of cards to see how long a chain reaction he can make.

day 2228: odin’s tests a new “old maid” strategy.



odin and i were playing a round of old maid ( which i had no idea evolved from an ancient gambling game in which the loser pays for the drinks ) and i noticed a flash of devilishness cross his face as he not-so-subtly arranged the cards in a not-so-subtle attempt to influence my selection of cards from his hand.

odin, after a few rounds of watching me pass up on the extended card, grew puzzled. “poppi, why aren’t you taking this card.”

“which card?”

“this card, you know, this one.” ( presumably the “old maid” card that you don’t want to get left with at the end of the game )

“oh, i don’t know, i think i don’t want that one.”

“oooooh, yeeeeesssss, you dooooooooo.”

while it’s cute to watch him push the boundaries of the rules, i think we need to work on his poker face.