“If Uno, Uno.”
Surprise! The header image is the twist this time: I’m skipping this post. I’m still out of town, so I’m also kind of taking a vacation from a thing I already don’t really do, which is writing for this blog. You have been skipped.
Also, UNO is pretty fun. I think it’s a fun way to spend time, especially because it works so well with large groups of people. Just the other day, I played a game of UNO with like seven or eight people, ranging in age from 13 to 70-something. UNO bridges generational divides by making everyone equally upset at having to draw an extra four cards every other round. Also, I feel like everyone kind of knows how to play UNO, which is bizarre, if you think about it, because the game as we know it was first invented in 1971, which means there are millions of people who predate the invention of UNO.
But it feels so much older than that. Like, when did you first play UNO? How did you learn to play it? Who taught you? How did they learn how to play? No one reads the UNO instructions. No one has ever read the UNO instructions I don’t think most people even have a copy of the instructions, even if they have two or three decks of various themed UNOs lying around in a box somewhere. I think the rules to playing UNO are just so deeply ingrained in the collective American conscious that no one knows when they learned UNO; they just know UNO. It’s like the pledge of allegiance or the entirety of the first Shrek movie; it’s always been a part of our culture. It spreads itself around, morphing and changing between various iterations. UNO is alive.Â
The history of UNO is kind of interesting, though, because it’s more or less just Crazy Eights with more colors, and that itself is a whole card game family of Shedding-type games, which stems from traditional northern European card games, like Mau-Mau, and that connects back to other styles of card games, like trick-taking games similar to Tarot, and that stems from… well, you get the idea. The more I dive into card games, the more I realize just how expansive it all is. Like, I thought Texas Hold ‘Em was all there was for a long time. I just learned how to play Solitaire yesterday. But I don’t know. Isn’t it weird that UNO and Yu-Gi-Oh both stem from the same family tree?
Also, I know this is old news, but the “stacking” version of UNO, where you can play draw-two and draw-four on top of each other, is illegal. I keep re-discovering that fact every time I look it up, and it surprises me each time. I do get why it’s illegal; it’s super unbalanced, from a game design perspective, to drop eight cards on someone at once, and eradicate any chance at winning. IT’s the same reason you’re supposed to only draw one card when you can’t play anything, because drawing fifteen cards all at once because you don’t have a blue card is horseshit, Cheyenne, and I’m not doing it!
In all honesty, I do think that those “house rules” do make the game more interesting to play, so I keep them around, but the biggest flaw with them (and also their benefit, perhaps?) is that they introduce the possibility of the game going on much longer than intended. Like, hours. I played an hour and a half game of UNO this weekend. And that’s why I’m not writing a long blog this week.
Anyway, you should play UNO. But I don’t need to tell you that. Everyone has played UNO at least once. If you haven’t, you are a biologic and memetic anomaly. You may exist outside of the collective subconscious and should consider for yourself what that means.
Also, please tell me how you’ve never played UNO by leaving a comment below.
