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PLAYING THE CARD GAME SEQUENCE

The simplest game of the family has no Stops at all, but it belongs in the family as a sort of great-grandfather of the other games. This parent form, called Sequence, is excellent for very young children.

SEQUENCE

Number of Players: 2 to 10. Four or 5 players make the best game.

Cards: Deal one at a time to each player until the deck is used up. It doesn't matter if some of the players are dealt more cards than the others.

Object: To get rid of all of your cards.

The Play: The player at the dealer's left puts down his lowest card in any suit he chooses to begin with. The rank of the cards is:

(Highest) Ace-King-Queen-Jack-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2 (Lowest)

After the first card has been put down on the table, whoever has the next-highest card in the same suit must put it down. This process continues, until somebody finally plays the Ace of that suit.

For example, suppose that the first player's lowest spade is the 4. (This would be so if some other player had the 3 and the 2 of spades.) The first player puts down the 4 of spades, somebody else plays the 5 of spades, another player puts down both the 6 and the 7 of spades (it doesn't matter if the same person plays two or more cards in a row), and this process continues until somebody finally plays the Ace of spades.

When the Ace is reached, the one who plays it must begin a new suit. As before, the player who begins the suit must begin with his lowest card in that suit.

Sooner or later, one of the players will get rid of all of his cards. He wins the hand, and the other players lose one point for each card that they still have when the hand comes to an end. (A simpler method is to forget the scoring by points and just play to win the hand.)

Skillful Play: Practically no skill is required for this game. It is wise to begin with the deuce of some suit when it is your turn to begin a play. If you have no deuce, you should begin with a 3—or the lowest card of any suit in your hand. If you don't follow this policy, you may eventually get stuck with a deuce or a 3 in your hand-.

The great value of the game for very young children is that it is very easy to teach and that the children get practice in recognizing the numbers and in learning how the numbers follow each other in sequence. For especially young children, it is possible to remove the picture cards from the deck and use only the numbers from 1 to 10. In this case, of course, the Ace is the lowest card, and the 10 is the highest card of each suit.

Related terms include yu gi oh trading card game and casino war card game.