by Lore Sjöberg

Crazy Eights
The great thing about Crazy Eights is that, as a kid, I could inject new life and vitality into the game by changing it to, say, Crazy Twos. Now that I'm several years on the established credit side of adulthood, the distinction eludes me, but I can assure you that at seven, Crazy Eights and Crazy Twos were completely different games. C+

Poker
Ah yes, the Game of Kings. Particularly craggy-faced, vaguely oily kings named "Slick Eddie the Sixth." There's a big caveat here, though. "Poker," in my estimation, is comprised only of five-card draw, five-card stud, and seven-card stud. All other Poker-like games are divided into "Games played by people who like to chit-chat while pretending to play Poker," which includes Anaconda, Chicago, and any game where anything is wild; and "Games played in card rooms that suck away your money with the force and speed of a cartoon anteater," which includes Hold 'Em and any Lo-Ball game. A

War
What, pray tell, is the point? In your basic game of War, the entire interminable game is pre-determined by the deal, so you may as well invent the War Resolution Device, into which you can feed the deck and have it scan the cards and tell you who won, thereby freeing up huge amounts of massively pointless time. People find better things to do; science, philosophy, and the arts make vast advances, and we're all thrust into an era of perfect peace and understanding like those Jehova's Witness pamphlets where multicultural kids get to play with baby pandas for all eternity. D

Solitaire
You know, I just can't play Solitaire with a deck of cards any more. I'm spoiled, made soft and listless by Freecell and other computer solitaire games which shuffle, deal, and tell you when you've completely blown it. I think it says something about our society that we've managed to make killing time incredibly efficient, allowing us to kill an hour of spare time in only fifteen minutes. B

Go Fish
This one has lost what little appeal it had. It's the "Candyland" of card games, but without the gluttonous backstory. The only real selling point of Go Fish is that it has the simplest rules this side of "52-card Pick-Up," which means you can play it with little kids. However, in this age of Virtua Rapper Karnage 3-D, for a kid Go Fish probably holds all the fascination of a symposium on exchange rate futures and their impact on the emerging global economy. C-