Last week my partner’s sister and her husband spent the night so we could indulge in our favourite sleepover pastime of getting wasted and playing Solo, a weird old German card game my family plays. It’s similar to euchre but your partner changes each hand according to the bidding, and there are funny words derived from Low German for the different bids. Players go out when they reach 36 points, and the game is played until only one person is left, which is called “taking the buck”. I had the worst game of my life, dealt terrible cards and also ending up with the least helpful partners, and at one point well into the game I still had no points and thought, I’d better take a picture of this to show my mom. So here’s a thrilling scoresheet photo for you:
By the time the game was over and I was declared The Buck, I’d earned points on one hand. I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t, because that would have been a scoresheet worth framing:
I still might frame it, and hang it behind the kitchen bench where we play cards, because my mom said it was the worst score she’d ever seen. In our family’s heyday there would be three separate tables of Solo going at every holiday gathering, so having any kind of superlative game in this family is kind of amazing.
Don’t tell my mom (hi, yes I’m 53 but just don’t tell my mom, okay) but I’m planning to get knuckle tattoos, in the fancy lettering from the Bicycle Playing Cards box, that say CLUB SOLO, the biggest scoring hand you can get. Even though a couple of my friends have said that everyone will assume it’s some kind of Star Wars reference.
