Children of the 90s' Favorite Card Games

In an age before high stakes online Texas Hold 'Em and the Wii World Series of Poker, it didn't take such a steady stream of ceaseless technology to hold our attention. As kids, we didn't even need to have any cash at stake to enjoy some good old fashioned gaming. A deck of cards from the dollar store was usually more than enough to keep us going for hours at a time. Depending on how traumatizingly competitive your friends were, you could get locked in playing card rematches for days. After all, they called it War for a reason.

By no means did children in the 90s invent any of these card games--far from it. We were a generation still easily engaged and entertained by the same games that had kids for decades before us. Sure, we loved our Gameboys and Sega Geneses*with as much devotion as kids today value their Nintendo DSes or Wii consoles, but we were also pretty satisfied playing a simple card game. As long as it had all of the necessary prerequisite components--rapid hand movements, quick thinking, overarching competition, the potent power to shame one of our unsuspecting and easily agitated friends--we were captivated.

Our favorite games went by many names, but the rules were usually the same. I always marveled at the manner in which these rules were transmitted from generation to generation, kid to kid. Most of us couldn't remember ever learning the rules, but we usually excelled in the arts of slapping jacks and dumping our Speed stockpiles all the same.


Spit/Speed


If you've got exemplary fine motor skills, this is the game for you. Those kids that couldn't hold their scissors right (er, me) always lagged behind in this race against your card-letting opponent. In Spit, both players have five mini stockpiles of card with the top one face up and a hand of Spit cards. In preparation for many office-drone days spent mastering computer solitaire, each player would try to use their available cards to put down the next card in ascending or descending sequence to the card face-up in the middle pile. Sound complicated? It is. I'm still not sure I understand it after that mediocre description.

Once neither of you could play any cards, you could yell "Spit!" and turn over some new cards. It was usually a battle of who was quickest, which is why the other version is more aptly named Speed. What kind of a name is Spit, anyway? In Speed I actually had a prayer of winning because my far-faster opponent couldn't see my cards, but I usually still lost every round regardless.


War


Whoever dreamed this one up no doubt aimed to give it the most bad-ass name to belie its incredible simplicity. Two players have a pile, you each flip up your top card, the one with the higher card takes both, first with all the cards wins. Sounds simple, until you get into a war. That's right, a war. Sounds scary, right? Some hand-to-hand combat, perhaps, or maybe some friendly fire?

You think those things sound warlike, wait till you hear this: you put three cards facedown and one up. The one with the best top card wins it all. I know, I know. Heavy stuff. If you get lucky, you can keep warring until someone wins a massive pile of cards and their opponent pouts in shame. It's all pretty intense, so I'll give you some time to let it all sink in.


Slapjack
I once played this game with a kid who called it "Heart Attack", which I thought was kind of cute but mostly tragic. I prefer Slapjack, which is kind of violent but mostly tasty. Everyone goes around and puts a card on the pile and nothing happens. For many, many rotations. Fun, right? Then, a jack is played, and the fun begins! By fun I mean attempting to slap the deck while more likely inadvertently taking out one of your fellow players. The likelihood of this game to end in injury is extremely high, and chances are even higher that this injury will lead to both tears and tattling.


Go Fish
This one is an old standard, so I felt compelled to leave it in despite the fact that it's not the most exciting of cardgames. I used to like it because we had a special deck of cards with different kinds of fish on it, so instead of asking if you had any threes I could instead inquire as to your possessing any Terry Tunas. It was a fleeting thrill, though, because the game is pretty much only exciting if you're 8 years old or younger. It goes a little something like this: whoever ends up with the most pairs wins. Try to contain your excitement.


Egyptian Ratscrew

This image is from the iPhone version. I want this so badly, and I don't even have an iPhone

The name of the game never phased me as a kid, but really, what? I don't get it. After conducting some diligent research (read: Wikipedia. I do.) the origins of the name remain a mystery. No matter where it picked up the quirky moniker, this game defies categorization.

ERS is, in technical terms, an infinitely more awesome version of the game Slapjack. Don't believe me? Take a break from delighting in your daily dose of nostalgia and go play Slapjack. Now go play Egyptian Ratscrew. Consensus? The level of awesomeness doesn't even compare. It's like comparing Jacks to Aces, which if you play Egyptian Ratscrew you know to be impossible. Jacks are far superior. And so is Egyptian Ratscrew.

It's an indubitably complex games, but here's a subpar summary: everyone gets an equal portion of the fairly distributed deck. You go around in a circle putting a card each face-up on the center pile. Any face card or ace is something of a trump card, bringing you one step closer to ownership of that hefty middle pile. You've got an opportunity to present a trump card of your own, too: for an ace four chances, a king three, a queen two, and a jack one.

There's also many variations of pile-slapping involved, most commonly in the arena of double cards in the middle pile. Slapping can be assigned to other rarer and more delicious anomalies, like sandwiches. This tends to get pretty competitive, resulting in worst-case scenarios like broken fingers, ring-related maimings, and severed friendships. Don't worry, though. It's still awesome.


BS/Doubt

This is a game that teaches children two valuable skills for their future casino gambling experiences: bluffing and swearing. In brief, you go around in the circle and have to put down cards in sequence. You get to put them facedown, though, which means you can lie your head off. One time I got busted trying to put down five queens. Five queens. True story.

If you think someone is lying, you can typically yell "Bullshit!" or in more PG cases something like "Doubt!" or "Bluff!" Those don't really pack the same punch. You're trying to get rid of all of your cards, so you'd want to dump as many as possible on each turn. If you get caught BSing, you have to take the pile. If you wrongfully accuse someone of BSing, you take the pile. It generally leads to a lot of heated arguments, and, appropriately, swearing.



Asshole

Above is the drinking version? Doesn't it look fun?

Speaking of swearing. This is apparently the Americanized version of the Japanese game Dai Hin Min. Really? Dai Hin Min** to Asshole? No wonder people scorn the Americanization of things. It's pretty brutal.

The game involves different rankings, usually called something like president, vice president, treasurer, and asshole. You might not know it, but that's the actual line of succession we use in this country for ascendance to leadership. You better hope nothing happens to that treasurer.

It's kind of complicated, but the gist of it is that you try to get rid of all your cards and, like in real life, holding a higher office affords you certain privileges. I recently discovered that this game is also commonly played as a drinking game, so I'm gonna get on that and let you know how it goes. It sounds pretty promising.


Spoons/Pig

My boyfriend and I had a disagreement about whether or not this game existed, as he was about 87% positive I had just made it up. Luckily in this age of information technology, the internet confirmed what I often suspect to be the case: that I am right. He graciously conceded and I tried to explain the game to him but he still found it to be completely ridiculous, which is probably true. If any of you out there have played it, though, back me up on this one.

You start with four cards apiece and start passing cards around the circle with the goal of getting four of a kind. It sounds simple enough, but it gets incredibly frustrating, particularly after you let that queen go and then three more went by and you're collecting twos and you're almost positive that girl across the circle is too. Really, tempers are flaring here. Once one person has achieved four of a kind, they grab a spoon from the pile in the middle, or touch their nose, or stick out their tongue, or perform whatever pre-agreed upon notion signifies their achievement.

There's always one person who's too caught up making their four-set that they miss out on it entirely and are thus publicly shamed as the loser. I'm not sure if the bitterness translates that well over the internet, but suffice it to say I've been in that situation many, many times, and it's pretty embarrassing. It's like your ultimate fear: everyone is looking at you and mocking you and you have no idea. Scarring.


Enjoy your weekend, children of the 90s! I give you full license to practice any of these as weekend drinking games, feel free to report back on Monday on how that went. I think there's some serious potential here.



*I'm sorry, is that the plural of Genesis? Geneses? Genisises? Someone help me out here.

**Translation: Poor Man. I told you the Americanized version was worse, but I just thought I'd add a supplemental footnote in case any of you innocently pondered if Dai Hin Min translated literally to "asshole"

The Sandlot

No matter how tough we claim to be, most of us are suckers for a heartwarming sports movie. It's just embedded somewhere deep within our sentimental DNA. We want to resist the urge to tear up involuntarily at hackneyed plot twists and deliberately corny character triumphs, but resistance is generally in vain. It's best to just give in and enjoy the tearful ride.

In The Sandlot, it doesn't matter that the story meanders all over the place and that major chunks plot hinge on rescuing a valuable autographed baseball from the drooly jaws of a giant anonymously evil dog. Wether or not you as an individual enjoy the sport of baseball, you can't deny the charm of a warmhearted baseball movie. There's something sort of old-fashioned and timeless about a ragtag group of perpetual losers who grow together as a team and eventually excel against all odds at their chosen sport. Yes, it's just like Bad News Bears, or The Mighty Ducks (If The Mighty Ducks was about baseball, I mean), or any other number of coming-of-age sports movies, but the underdog story seems to get us every time.



The movie opens on our less-than-heroic child protagonist Scotty Smalls moving to his new home in Los Angeles in the early 60s. Smalls is a hopeless ball player and a self-described egghead, which doesn't seem to bode to well for him socially as the new kid. Though his stepfather Bill is a big enough fan to own a baseball signed by Babe Ruth, he seems generally uninterested in helping Scotty improve his game.

Smalls stumbles upon a junkyard sandlot and meets up with a motley crew of neighborhood boys playing baseball. Smalls joins in and is, of course, terrible, and faces mocking from his fellow players until star player admirable Benny comes to his defense. Under Benny's tutelage, he quickly becomes one of the gang in a way that's only possible in movies. Five minutes later, it seems that the sandlot crew couldn't function without Scotty's significant contributions to the team. Your heart feels warmer already, doesn't it?


In typical coming-of-age movie fashion, we get to see all sorts of humorous anecdotal firsts for our sandlot boys. The Sandlot shows us the world through the eyes of childish wonder and mischief in a time when summer was a time of freedom and playfulness. Our gang engages in first crushes, lusting after the red-suited teenage lifeguard at their municipal pool. In typical movie magic more, Michael "Squints" Palledorous fakes drowning to receive mouth to mouth from the object of the affection, Wendy Peffercorn. As the adult Scotty's voice-over describes it, Squints' action was simultaneously sneaky, rotten, and low...and cool:



Our heroes also manage to scare an entire generation of 90s kids out of using chewing tobacco in what is possibly one of the grossest and most memorable puking scenes of our collective childhoods. If you, like our sandlot friends, ever entertained the idea of chewing tobacco to be like your baseball heroes, simply subject yourself to the sordid scene in which the boys celebrate by hopping on some fast-moving carnival rides. The image of this incessant vomiting all over the ride, the passerby, and the boys themselves was enough to ensure I'd never touch the stuff. Lucky for all of you innocent bystanders, I couldn't actually find a clip online of the kids throwing up all over everything. Perhaps people found it to be in bad taste, though I can't imagine why. Regardless, here's the precursor to their stomach-turning shenanigans:




The boys' lighthearted antics are offset by a darker force lurking behind the boys' beloved baseball diamond. As the new friends bond, the regulars clue Smalls into the legends of the sandlot. They explain that he should never hit a home run past the fence for fear of encountering The Beast, a vicious mastiff who purportedly eats both baseballs and people on a recreational basis:



After Benny maims the group's last baseball with a strong hit, Scotty saves the day by replacing the ball with one from his own house. He fails to realize that the ball is a prized collectors' item, his stepfather's ball signed by Babe Ruth. Scotty hits the ball into Beast territory and is stricken to learn that he jeopardized the fate of such a valuable item. It's pretty priceless when his teammates berate him for losing a ball signed by Babe Ruth, and Scotty muses, "Who's she?"



After a number of elaborate schemes to retrieve the valuable keepsake, the Great Bambino comes to Smalls in a dream, the kids regroup and manage to snatch the ball of The Beast. But, as this is a coming-of-age movie, they can't do it without learning a bunch of lessons, making a new wise friend, and getting a new, better signed ball to replace the mangled one. As we see what becomes of our pals as they grow into adulthood, we just can't help but be moved by the naked sentimentality of it all.

The Sandlot draws us in because it truly gets what it means to be a 12-year old kid in the middle of the summer where all that matters is making friends, getting girls, and playing sports. It's completely devoid of any adult-driven moralizing and worrying. Instead, it gives us the kid-centric world in which imagination runs wild and all that matters is the here and now. The movie doesn't present kids as superheroes or extraordinary individuals; it just allows them to be kids. Oh, and it also gives us a great opening to quote "You're killing me, Smalls!" if any of our friends appear clueless in the art of chocolate/graham cracker/marshmallow artistry. Seriously, you should use it sometime:



Or, better yet, you could just get this t-shirt:

Poorly Reviewed 90s Movies

As children, we don't always possess the discerning and refined taste of adults. We may grow up believing a film we saw as a child to be a cinematic masterpiece, only to find as a grown up that it's a truly dark chapter in moviemaking history. In other cases, though, even kids know it's utter crap. That's when you know we're in trouble.

Considering how many laborious, time-consuming steps it takes to write, cast, produce, release, and promote a movie, it's impressive that some of these films even made it to theaters. You'd think at some point in the production process the hundreds of people employed by the movie studio would look at each other and ask, "What are we doing here? This is terrible." Yet somehow, these movies persevered. Poor judgment prevailed, and these movies made their ways to our local cinematic facilities and, more recently, to our dollar stores 5-for-a-buck bins.

While there were many truly awful widely released movies in the 90s, these are among most painfully unwatchable:


Kazaam



If you excel in one area, your skills must automatically extend to all other arenas, right? So goes the reasoning in crossover features like 1996's Kazaam, starring basketball star and all-around sellout Shaquille O'Neal. In the film, Shaquille plays a genie that fell out of his enlampment into a nearby boombox and chose to establish it his new wish-granting headquarters. A young boy stumbles upon the boombox, unleashes the genie, and is granted three wishes.

It's not a terrible premise, but the screenwriters manage to turn it into both something totally unappealing to children and a shameless unsuccessful vehicle to launch O'Neal's doomed rap career. The movie's villains are music piraters, which is sure to confuse any child remotely interested in following the film's plot. Oh, and did I mention that the story is almost exactly like Aladdin, the Disney version of which was released just a month following Kazaam? Tough break.



Baby Geniuses



It's almost difficult to make a movie this bad. You'd think the inherent cuteness of babies could let this project coast for a little on its charm, but it's so awful that it damns any of its potentially redeeming qualities. The movie stars Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd as evil scientist types who set out to unlock the code to babies' speech. It hinges on the ancient notion that babies possess innate knowledge and wisdom until they learn to talk, which could be sort of interesting if they hadn't made the movie so terribly creepy with bad computer animation. Babies perform complex martial arts moves on adults, engage in disco dancing, and have oddly miscued lips timed to the dubbed adult voice-overs. A gimmick done right can help set up a movie, but it can't uphold the entire thing when it's entirely devoid of plot, common sense, and humor.



Bio-Dome



Casting Pauly Shore as one of your male leads doesn't generally bode well for your film's eventual earning potential. Aside from the ever-nauseating Pauly Shore performance, Bio Dome is also prime evidence that Stephen Baldwin is the far inferior of the Baldwin clan. The two play a pair of dimwits who stumbled upon an ecological enclosure after mistaking it for a mall. The rest of the plot is so inane and nonsensical it's probably not even worth using valuable cyberspace real estate describing our stars' antics, but suffice it to say this movie would make an efficient torture tool. After a few repeat viewings, I'd talk.



Mr. Nanny



Speaking of terrible sports crossovers. I get that the joke is suppose to be the discrepancy between being a badass wrestler and holding a stereotypically female child-tending job, but it's really not working for me. If you've seen the more recent Vin Diesel vehicle The Pacifier, it's pretty much exactly the same thing. Save yourself the pain and just watch neither.



Super Mario Bros



It was a pretty novel concept at the time: a movie based on a popular video game franchise. Kids everywhere loved the game and its quirky characters, so it seemed a logical leap to further capitalize on its earning power by releasing a live action film version. Unfortunately, moviemakers managed to create a film that lacked appeal to any of the target demographics. While the game itself was light and fun, the movie version was far darker, failing to capture the attention of children while being too cheesy to appeal to teenagers. The movie also failed to adhere to the major tenets of the video game's plot and characters, infuriating loyal fans everywhere. You just don't mess with video game enthusiasts. They know their stuff.



It's Pat



Not every comedy sketch has the qualities to stretch itself into a full length film. It may be funny for a few minutes at a time, but at 80+ minutes it may fail to elicit more than a couple of chuckles. Such was the case with It's Pat, a Saturday Night Live sketch turned feature film about a mysteriously androgynous person. After an hour or so, I don't care whether Pat is a man or a woman--I just want out.



Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot



I love the late Estelle Getty, but I still can't excuse her from appearing in this Sylvester Stallone action/comedy that fails to deliver both action and comedy. The entire plot of the movie is encapsulated in its title, but they could have done without the "Stop!" caveat; most of us would rather be shot by Sly's movie mom than have to sit through this movie.



Striptease



Talk about a shameless premise for a movie: Demi Moore gets naked. It may be exploitative, only in the sense that Demi and Co. were exploiting us; Moore received a record $12.5 million for her performance in the film. Moore stars as Erin, a former FBI employee engaged in a custody battle with her ex-husband. Tapped out financially from legal costs, Erin turns to stripping to cover the costs of an appeal to win back her daughter. A congressman gets involved, there's some sort of drama/mystery element, but it's all just pretty bad and never establishes itself in any watchable genre of film.

Leonard Maltin actually gave the film no stars. I just watched an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 featuring the film Laserblast, which was possibly the most terrible movie I've ever seen but to which Maltin had awarded two and a half stars. By deductive reasoning, Striptease must be the worst movie ever made.



Showgirls



See above. Replace "Demi Moore" with "Elizabeth Berkeley". Disregard plot. It's not really important, anyway.


So 'fess up, children of the 90s, if any of these movies appeal to you for any other reason than the main characters appearing naked in them. Own the shame. It's okay. Let it out. We can accept if you have a soft spot for talking babies or Pauly Shore. We all have our differences. Your difference may just be poor taste in movies.