Peter: Just the Trick

The fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears was never one of my favourites as a child, perhaps because in the version then popular, the nasty little Goldilocks escaped her just punishment for invading the hardworking bears’ home. But the story of Goldilocks does remind us that we want things to be just right for our purposes, not too hot to eat or too cold to be enjoyable, but “just right,” as Goldilocks tells herself before gobbling up all of the Little Bear’s porridge. In addition to a fondness for violent children’s stories, I enjoyed a lot of games as a child: hide and seek, Snap, Monopoly, chess, draughts, euchre, and so on. Some started as hot favourites, but then cooled. The three favourites I enjoyed the most for the longest are chess, euchre and Monopoly. Its perfect blend of challenging strategy and random luck that gave my brothers, sisters and I the added thrill of playing a grown up game while we had hours of fun together, made euchre my favourite childhood game, which endured while others passed. 

First, euchre is challenging, but not too challenging. Monopoly is a fun game that gave my brothers and sisters and I hundreds of hours of fun, but because the outcome is largely determined by random accidents throwing dice, it got a bit boring after a while. Chess, on the other hand, has no accidental luck: it’s a pure strategy game. I loved that, but it was very intense, and most people I knew did not love that much challenge. Euchre, in contrast, was just the right mix of strategy and luck. The cards that the players are dealt are important, but each player or team of two then has to work out, without talking about what they have, how to make the most of the cards they have been dealt. Good players could win tricks by carefully playing a hand of cards  that had looked pretty awful. Getting enough tricks to win a bid that had been risky was a triumph of planning and if playing pairs, of cooperation with your partner. 

More personally for me and my siblings, euchre was a grown up game. Our parents played it with friends at home, and they played it at their clubs. When we were old enough, around ages of ten, they introduced it to us. Actually, it was mainly our aunts, who loved to play. My mum’s sisters often stayed with us, and when the table had been cleared after dinner, out would come the deck of cards, and we would join the adult game of euchre, but we only played for points, not money as my mum and her crony sisters did at their clubs. Aunt Clarice was a few years older than our mother, and in my mind, she is always dressed in a long, maroon dressing gown, with a cigarette in one hand, and her cards in the other, often with a glass of wine nearby. She seemed like a witch in a fairy tale, with her hair mussed up a bit, her height, and a cackling laugh that came all the time. If she got good cards, she laughed and made a joke. If she got awful cards and lost, she laughed and made a rude comment, but toned down a little if my father was within hearing range. I used to think she lived permanently in the same maroon dressing gown, and I can’t imagine her now except in it, but she must have worn something else when she went to her clubs or shopping, surely? Nothing made us feel so grown up as playing euchre with Aunt Clarice and her sisters. 

But the best thing about euchre was the sheer sociable, fun of it all. Even if Aunty Clarice wasn’t gracing us with her lively presence, our games were noisy, nothing at all like the deadly silent chess battles I also loved. We would argue over whether a card had been misplayed, over whether someone had broken a rule, over the terrible contract our reckless partner had committed us to. We boasted when we won, and accused the winners of underhand tactics, or blamed the cards, when we lost. But it was all done with laughter. Nothing on TV could give half so much fun as our card games, which often went on for hours. Sometimes our father would tell us to quieten down a bit, or point out that it was an hour past our bed times. But when we had her there as an ally, Aunty Clarice was particularly good at keeping things going till midnight. 

These days, we always try to fit in a game or two of euchre on my annual visits to Australia. Our aunts are all gone now, Aunt Clarice perhaps buried in her beloved maroon dressing gown, but when my brothers and sisters and I get together, we relive those happy memories from our childhood as we enjoy the adult pleasure of the same challenging, fun game that we have loved for fifty years. Sadly last year that also fell victim to Covid. But perhaps we’ll have better luck this year; my great-nieces and nephews are now reaching the age where they might enjoy being introduced to the old-fashioned game that has given their parents and grandparents so much fun.