Playing and learning through cards

A few years ago, I taught J and Prime a popular Chinese card game, "win the upper hand". We also taught this game to our non-Chinese friends and had a ball playing with them too. (They wanted to keep scores but is not part of the game) Then a few days ago, Prime got a hold of the cards, and got caught with the playing card bug. I was surprised he still remember most of the rules.

We played many rounds before it dawned on me Prime was not super clear on the order of the cards esp. after 10 so I showed him. He loved putting the cards in order and was so proud that he can do it easily now. This was good exercise in learning single, pair, 3 of kind. He had the most trouble with the single cards surprisingly.Perhaps it was because Prime only focuses on 1 attribute like beating the cards while forgetting he is splitting a pair. J learned not to use up all her big cards first or she will get stuck on the smaller cards.


Prime and J is getting better at sorting their cards. They first find the pairs and then put the single in order. I put the fan of cards in their hands but they do the sorting themselves. Learning to hold the cards so you can pull the cards out also turned out to be a good fine motor skills practice. Prime really loves to play the game while J likes to creates her stories with the face cards and of course the black vs red cards. Anyway you play it, it is lots of fun.
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To play this easy game, each player get 13 cards and can be played with 2-4 players. The order of the cards is shown above. In the first round, person who have spade of 3 goes first. You can put down single, a pair or three of a kind. We didn't get into the chain with the kids but you can. In this game, the color does not matter as in poker. If you happen to get 4 of a kind like (4 Js), it is a "bomb" and can beat anything unless someone has a 4 of kind that is bigger than yours. If you cannot beat it or do not want to beat it, you will say pass. The person who wins that round can start with anything, single, pair, etc. The first player to get ride of all cards is the winner.

(In the next round, the loser will have to give the winner of last round his biggest card unless he have both jokers then he will not have to. In return, the loser will also receive a card (usually a small card) in exchange.