The game in her hands was a card game called Stamina!
"I've never heard of it," Dean said.
"Me neither," added Barney. "How long have we had that game in our closet?"
"Never mind that," Shauna interrupted, "How do we play?"
Sue-Ellen took off the lid of the box and tossed it to Shauna. She sat down at the dining table and began shuffling the deck of cards inside.
"There are the rules on the lid," she said.
Dean, Shauna and Barney followed her and sat at the table. Shauna placed the box lid in the centre of the table so they could all read it. It said,
STAMINA! RULES
Players take it in turns to play cards on each other,
until one person gives up! Then every starts over for
the next round, but not the loser!
- To Start:
Deal 5 cards from the deck to each player. Anyone who
lost the last game may go first. The person to the
left of that person goes second, and so on round the
table.
(If this is your first game, the person to the left of
the dealer goes first).
- In your turn, you may either:
A. Draw 1 card from the deck.
(But be careful, you may not have more than 7 cards in
your hand at once!)
B. Play 1 card from your hand. Choose who you want to
play it on and place it on the table in front of them.
(You can also play any card on yourself!)
- The game ends:
A. When someone quits. That person is the loser and the
rest of the players are winners.
B. When no one has any cards left in their hand, the
person who had the most cards played on them is the
winner, and the rest are losers!
(Winners start over for the next round, but losers
carry the cards played on them through to the next
round - don't shuffle those cards back into the deck!)
- If you have more than 7 cards in your hand:
You must choose 1 card from your hand and play it on
yourself, immediately, until your hand is down
to 7 cards.
- If you have 0 cards in your hand:
You may only choose to draw a card from the deck if you
already have 1 or more cards in your hand - if you've no
cards in your hand, you can't draw any more!
When Shauna had finished reading, she looked up to see Sue-Ellen had already shuffled and dealt four piles of five cards around the table. The guys were sitting down either side of Sue-Ellen, opposite each other.
Shauna joined the others and took the face down cards in front of her and looked at them. The back of each card was completely black in colour, with no pattern or artwork to be found. On the other side, each had a colourful, abstract illustration and a title in bold at the top of the card. Many of them had instructions written below the image.
"These are weird," Shauna said. "There's not much on each card, is there? I mean, there's no description apart from their titles, and they don't make much sense."
"Don't worry Shauna," Sue-Ellen replied, with a hint of condescension in her voice, "rules on cards are meant to be concise to save space. You'll pick it up as you go along."
"Okay, who's first?" Barney asked.
"Me," replied Dean. "Left of the dealer, right?"
"Yeah," Sue-Ellen agreed. "You first, Dean."
Dean looked at the five cards in his hand, and...
