Muggins with Grandma Kathleen

Grandma Kathleen is one of the sweetest women I've met. She is very soft spoken, but a great disciplinarian. You know, one of those where the soft, serious voice is scarier than yelling.

She fits the description for the ideal grandmother: she has a stock of sugary cereals just for her grandchildren, a candy bowl, treats after every meal, AND lots of games and kids books. She was always up for playing games with us, even when other adults might find our games childish and tedious.

My favorite game to play with Grandma is a card game called Muggins. I think it's a pretty old game, because they don't sell the cards anymore. I just did an internet search for it, and there were no results for the particular card game I'm thinking of. However, we played the game with cards from the game Flinch:

Picture taken from here

The gameplay is very similar to the game described in this Wikipedia article, except that you say "muggins!" instead of "flinch!" when a player fails to play a playable card. Also not mentioned in the article is that the person who yells "muggins!" gives their top card to the person who failed to notice the playable move. Thus, if you are good at spotting muggins opportunities, then you can get rid of your cards more quickly. There are evidently several versions of Flinch, but we only played one version of Muggins, where we would deal out all of the cards evenly between the players.

Another difference is that playing cards in the middle took precedence over playing cards on other player's discard piles. This made for a fun twist to the game, as well as more muggins-calling, since most players were more intent on giving cards to other players (giving the first player a greater advantage over the second player if no one notices that they should have played in the middle instead).

Grandma had no mercy when it came to calling Muggins on her young grandchildren, but that was part of the fun of it all. We would play Muggins over and over again just to get the chance to muggins Grandma, who was nearly perfect in her muggins playing. If we did catch Grandma and call muggins on her, we would brag about it at the dinner table that night. We also had fund piling our cards on each other's discard piles, pretending that we were doing them a great favor in giving them so many cards. So many fun, happy memories!

PS: if you are interested in trying the game out for yourself, it can be played using regular face cards. Austin and I did so with two decks of cards. Muggins is more fun if you have more than two players, though.