25 July 2020

This German Card Game Sponsored By Lake Titicaca and The Planet Uranus

3725A great long time ago, when the Brown Eyed Girl and myself fancied we'd someday visit Germany (let's get real now, yeah?) we'd avail ourselves of German products. There are still several that we like. Few, sadly, have hung around (I miss my Shoko-Kola, let's just say).

But we still do have this. It's a deck of cards for a simple game called Quartett. If you've played Authors, you know how it goes: you can two other chums deal this deck out between you, then you form your hand into melds and start asking each other for the cards you don't have. Once a meld is complete, you lay it down, and the first to run out of cards wins.

This, Verkehrszeichen Quartett, (Road-sign Quartett) is based on German traffic signs. The four cards making up each meld are lined up at the top of the card, a big lush photo of the sign in the middle and a description of what the sign accomplishes auf Deutsch caption it. There are 36 cards total, which divide into 9 melds, which makes it so that nobody can get a tie, or at least that makes it rather difficult.


But, I say, Herr Kartenspieler ... was ist das on der bach side?


"ASS Altenburger indeed" we giggle to our inner grade-schooler as we both enjoy the joke.

Sure, "ass" doesn't necessarily mean the same in English and that seems to be an initialism anyway.

But ... so what? If the whole internet can giggle whenever some space science reporter makes another creaky joke including the name of the seventh planet, then we can laugh at this.

So it goes.

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