PHOTOS by Roselove Jebsen

By Paula Pyzik Scott

I attended the April 18 Colonial Games & Pastimes event at the Bluffton Senior Center, hoping to do a little time travel back to the 18th century. In a nod to America 250 celebrations throughout the country, the plan was to enjoy games that our founding fathers and mothers enjoyed, such as checkers, marbles, pick-up sticks and whist. 

Having read many, many books in which characters have a seemingly endless appetite for whist, I was eager to find out what the attraction was. In fact, a book I read last week, A Lost Lady by Willa Cather, had characters whiling away a long winter by playing whist three nights a week.

The problem is, I rarely play cards anymore. Having grown up in a pinochle-playing family, I couldn’t tell you the last time I played a game IRL. A brief experiment with online pinochle during Covid lockdown was underwhelming.

So I was pretty pleased to sit down with Senior Center director Tonya Meyer and others to try my hand at whist. It was my good luck that whist is related to pinochle, being a four-player, trick-taking card game with partners and a trump suit.

Tonya had done her homework and filled us in on the history of the 52-card playing deck. I learned that early cards didn’t have numbers or king-queen-jack designations on the corners, which would have made a hand much more difficult to wrangle. We played a whist variation without Aces, and those cards were used to remind us what suit was currently trump.

Most appropriately, we played with a freshly opened pack of cards with a ‘76 design from 1976.

So, with my rusty card-playing skills, I sat down to learn an easy, fun version of whist. I had a lovely time playing with others who cycled in and out of the game so that everyone could give it a try.

At the same time, I drifted down memory lane to the pinochle games played with my grandmother and aunts and uncles at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I couldn’t stop myself from repeating the old family refrain: “Who dealt this mess?”

While I can't imagine playing cards multiple nights of the week, I'd rather not go another five years before I play again. Cards anyone?

MORE America 250 and other local events at What Brings You to Bluffton?