Mer and I just got back from our pastor’s house, where we played the card game Gang of Four. I won’t go into the rules, but it is a game where winners get more powerful and losers get weaker. You play until someone gets to 75, and then the person with the lowest score wins. Our pastor and his wife are very good, and one of them usually wins it. I have a strategy of  “dumping” cards – getting rid of cards as fast as possible to get low scores. It works well, but it usually means I don’t win hands, and so I don’t win games (I usually don’t come in last either). Last time we played (before Christmas), Mer won for the entire evening – rare, if not unique. Then, tonight, I won in the first hand. For that to happen, I had to play all of my cards while someone (our pastor) did not play any cards, and scored the worst score for one hand – 80 points. To my knowledge, that has never happened before (winning in one hand).

Then, to make the evening complete, we played a long game – 13 hands (most games are only 5-8 hands). I won that game as well – 23 to 69 (Mer) to 74 (our pastor) to 78 (our pastor’s wife). It was a tense game for me because I was convinced I was going to get stuck with a 30+ point round and lose the game (or at least the lead) after having a big lead after 9 rounds. Happily, I kept getting weird hands that worked out okay. In the game that I won in one turn (the first game), I thought I had one of the worst hands I had ever seen, but it worked out great. Strange how that happened.

Anyway, the Riordans are on a 3-0 Gang of Four winning streak. We’d better enjoy it while we can – it won’t last long.