And you are young, smug and snotty enough to play the part, he concluded without heat. Still, that s all it might be, just play-acting, with Barney going through the motions of being blind. You could be outside the Lodge, sonny. Any cross-roader who can tip dice the way you were working them can twitch an ear. Let s see some credentials. He scuffed through the sawdust to the bar and took a stack of silver dollars from his apron. He held them, dealerwise, in the palm of his hand, with his fingertips down, so that they were a column surrounded by a fence of fingers. How many? he asked. I shrugged. The whole stack, Smythe, I told him.
Magic Fly-catchers is played in precisely the same way, except that as in simple Magic, not one stone, but all are thrown up and caught--that is, if there are four on the ground one only is thrown up for the first, two for the second, three for the third, and so on until they are all picked up. This is, of course, the most difficult part of all, and, in fact, only experts were expected to do it. Every failure means out, and then your opponent has his turn. The winner is the one who gets through first. Such is the game as I remember it, but I have an uneasy suspicion that I have missed something out. I seem to remember one trick in which all the stones on the ground had to be picked up at once _where they lay_--scrambled up so to speak. Or it may be (and, in fact, I think it was) that sometimes, to add to the difficulty of the game, we picked up the groups of two, three, and four in Two-ers, Three-ers, and Four-ers in this fashion, instead of first placing them together.--Epworth, Doncaster (C. C. Bell).
If any player can legitimately make or increase a build, all may do so, provided they have the proper cards. _=Double Builds.=_ When two cards of the same denomination, or two builds of the same value are put together as one, they cannot be increased. For instance: A player holds 7 and 3, and there are upon the table a 5 2 and 4. He places his 3 on the 4, and gathers the 5 and 2 together, announcing the build as “Two Sevens.” This cannot be increased to 8, 9, or 10 under any circumstances, and nothing but a 7 will win it. Pairs may be doubled in the same manner. If a player has two Nines in his hand, and there is one on the table, he may build on the latter with one of his own, announcing, “Two Nines,” which will prevent any player from building either of them to 10, and will entitle the builder to take in both cards with his third Nine when it comes round to his turn. Should any other player at the table hold the fourth Nine, he could of course take in the build. It is necessary to distinguish between building and combining.
The ring finger, the little finger, and the thumb of the other hand were the first three battleships to be lost to the Rats--lost as people realized that there was something out there _underneath space itself_ which was alive, capricious and malevolent. Planoforming was sort of funny. It felt like like-- Like nothing much. Like the twinge of a mild electric shock. Like the ache of a sore tooth bitten on for the first time. Like a slightly painful flash of light against the eyes. Yet in that time, a forty-thousand-ton ship lifting free above Earth disappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half a light-year or fifty light-years off. At one moment, he would be sitting in the Fighting Room, the pin-set ready and the familiar Solar System ticking around inside his head. For a second or a year (he could never tell how long it really was, subjectively), the funny little flash went through him and then he was loose in the Up-and-Out, the terrible open spaces between the stars, where the stars themselves felt like pimples on his telepathic mind and the planets were too far away to be sensed or read. Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and horror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached out for inter-stellar space itself.
I sent a letter to my love, And by the way I droppt it; I dee, I dee, I dee, I droppt it, And by the way I droppt it. --Keith (Rev. W. Gregor). XIII. I had a little dog, it shan t bite you, Shan t bite you, shan t bite you, Nor you, nor you, nor you. I had a little cat, it shan t scratch you, Shan t scratch you, nor you, nor you. I wrote a letter to my love, and on the way I dropped it. And one of you have picked it up and put it in your pocket. It wasn t you, it wasn t you, nor you, nor you, but it was _you_.
If you ask for the heart Five, and miss it, the player with that card may draw all yours; but if you ask for the spade Five, and he gets into the ask, he will at once betray the fact that he holds the fourth Five by asking you for the club Five; but he will never think of asking you for the spade Five, because you asked for it yourself. If you can get into the ask again you can immediately make a trick in Fives. SPECULATION. Any number of persons less than ten can play, each contributing an agreed number of counters to the pool, the dealer paying double. The full pack of fifty-two cards is used, and the cards rank from the A K Q down to the 2. In _=dealing=_, the cards are distributed from left to right, one at a time, until each player has received three. The next card on the top of the pack is turned up, and the suit to which it belongs is the trump, and forms the basis of speculation for that deal. If the turn-up card is an ace, the dealer takes the pool immediately, and the deal passes to the left. If the turn-up is a K Q or J, the dealer offers it for sale, before a card is looked at, and he may accept or refuse the amount offered. Whether the card is sold or not, all the cards that have been dealt out are turned face up, and the highest card of the turn-up suit wins the pool.