Carom
Carom is a cross
between pool and air hockey played with a square wooden board and some
discs. The object is to flick the game disc at a disc of your own
colour and knock it into a corner hole. The board is coated with a
layer of chalk, which keeps friction down. It's not originally a
Nepalese game, but it's huge there - you see tables set up outside
everywhere.
Chinese Poker
Bruce introduced us to what he called "Chinese Poker". It's a rather
nice strategic card game, particularly the three player version - I
played quite a bit on the bus with him and Florian. You shuffle as
many packs of cards together as you want; one suffices for three
players. The cards are dished out. On the first game, the player with
the three of hearts plays it. Play then goes around the circle
clockwise - you need to beat the previous play using the same number
and type of cards, the ranking being
3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-J-Q-K-A-2-BlackJoker-RedJoker. The winner of that
round gets to make the next play - sequences of 3 or more, 2 or more of
a kind, or lockstepped sequences of 3 or more (eg 3,3,4,4,5,5). So to
beat a play of (3,3,4,4,5,5) would require at least (4,4,5,5,6,6). The
winner of the previous game gets to exchange the highest card of the
loser of the previous game (ie the last player left with cards) with
any card they don't need. There's also the "bomb", a set of (5, 10,
K) - which automatically wins the round. Sequences can't go over the
ace, ie the only thing that beats Q-K-A is a bomb. The jokers are of
uneven value singularly, but can be paired. As I said, it's a rather
nice
strategic card game - one of the interesting things is that it can be
worthwhile to lose rounds if winning them would damage the structure of
your hand. It's possible to be down to one card and be locked out of
the game by another player playing pairs and triples.
Collect 4
You
use four cards of the same value for each player, shuffling all the
cards together. The objective is to collect any set of four. One
player counts down repeatedly "3-2-1-Go". On go, you pass a card
anticlockwise to the next player, receiving a card from the player to
your left. When you have four cards of the same value, you touch your
nose. When that happens, all other players must touch their nose.
Last player to touch their nose takes a penalty of some kind.
In
the case of the game on the boat down the Mekong, the penalty was a pen
mark on the face. This was the only time I ended up using my Wet Ones
in all the months of carrying them.
Cricket
One
of the major differences between West Asia and East Asia is the
presence of cricket - on weekends, parks are jam-packed with games and
practice, and many are cricket fans.
Foot-Juggling
There were quite a lot of games similar to hackysack around - ie, keep
an object in the air without using hands. In Malaysia they used a
rattan ball, or a plastic equivalent, in Indochina and China it was a
weight with a badminton-shuttle-style flight, in Nepal and India there
were rubber scrunchies.
Frisbee
Brett brought a frisbee, so we often had a game when our vehicles
stopped for a break and elsewhere. Brett and Jeff were both excellent,
performing
fancy catches and fancy throws with ease. Everyone else was less so. I
was fairly abysmal -- hand eye coordination Not So Good. Interestingly
a lot of locals' instincts were to throw the frisbee upside down.
Sho
Sho
is a three-player Tibetan counter-racing game rather like backgammon (but
more complicated). The object is to get your stack of coins to
the end of the course which is set by small cowrie shells (that can be
shifted as required in order to expand or contract sections of the
course). Just like backgammon, if a stack lands on an opponent's
stack of equal or less height, it's kicked off the course. You can see
a version of the rules here.
Style
counts when playing Sho. Shouting, slamming the dice cup down
from a great height onto the leather of the pad, scooping the dice off
the yak-leather pad using inertia and the cup rather than your hand, and brushing
your opponents dead counters aside are all considered good form. What's
more, fiddling the dice is not only allowed, it's encouraged! Our
drivers would carefully place their dice in the cup, and attempt to use
inertia to keep the dice in the same orientation. Some of them were
rather good at it, and would achieve multiple turns by either rolling
3s or by killing opponents' stacks. Most of our group bought sho sets in Shigatse.
Video Games
If you see a sign saying "Video Games", there's a fair chance that
it'll be a dingy room filled with what in Australia are called Poker
Machines - ie, gambling games.
