Rummikub

Amongst our metaphors for life, being dealt a hand of cards is a common one. You’re given your family, your skin color, your genetic make-up, your culture, your location, your religion (or lack of it). Now we might include your ancestral traumas, the undigested grief of your forebears, the inherited shames of your cultural group. You have some choice as to how to shuffle and play the cards, but if you don’t draw the winning ones, it’s not your fault— just random chance at work. You just get what you get and you don’t get upset.

 

There are other theories at work. Hindu reincarnation suggests that your past karma determines your present card hand. The Greek idea of the Daimon and the Fates give you what you need to discover just exactly what you were born for. Certain psychologies suggest that your experience determines all, that nurture overpowers nature— though such experience also seems like a random card hand. 

 

Here with the grandkids, the games are abundant, with all levels of the dynamic between luck and skill. Card games that lean more towards luck— like War, Go-Fish, Trash— give us an out when we lose. “I just didn’t get the cards.” Games like Rummy 500 or Hearts require more choices and thus, more skill, though the cards you pick still matter. Games like chess (can’t think of a similar card game) start with an even playing board, so skill is everything.

 

I find myself enjoying the middle category, games that require skillful choices with “a little bit of luck.” My new favorite is Rummikub, which allows for a flexibility of adjusting and re-adjusting the numbered tiles in a way that keeps the brain wholly searching and active and considering a wide variety of choices. If had to pick one game that symbolizes our own choices in life, both the ability and the need to shuffle and re-shuffle our life experiences based on the inherited tiles we drew, the requirement that we stay alert and attentive to the possibilities, the suggestion that we needn’t attach to any combination of tiles already on the board, but treat them flexibly (like verbs instead of nouns!), Rummikub takes the prize. I find myself less concerned with winning and losing and more delighting in the way my brain feels while playing, a sensation of being wholly alive and present, the axons and dendrites firing on all cylinders like a happy dance. 

 

Shall we play?