Читать книгу Ting Tang Tommy - Simon Godwin - Страница 25

Playing cards are fiendishly difficult to throw. They are resistant to too much force and their shape means that you have to find an oblique approach to getting them on target. This game was originally played by the Victorians who would try and throw cards into a top hat. Sadly, most of us don’t keep one to hand anymore. But you do need a stiff hat with a wide brim. I have an old trilby, for example, that works perfectly well. Alternatively, a pudding basin or small bucket will both work well.

Here I have adapted the original, rather sedate game into a high-octane team competition. The game has acquired a greater urgency as you now have to balance accuracy with speed.

The aim of the game is to be the team that wins as many points as possible. The game ends when one team has managed to throw all their cards.

Begin by spreading a newspaper on the ground and placing your hat in the centre of it. Using a jumper, scarf or the edge of a rug, establish a line around 1.5 metres from the hat. This will be where players throw their cards from.

Divide the company into two teams. Each team is given half a pack of cards. One team has the red cards and the other the black cards. On ‘Go’, one by one a member of each team goes to the line and throws a card towards the hat. For every card that makes it successfully into the hat, players are awarded three points, for any that land on the rim players get two points and for any card that at least makes it onto the newspaper, players get one point. In the fast and furious snowstorm of cards, leave the scoring until all the cards have been thrown.

Both teams scramble to throw their cards as accurately and as rapidly as possible. When one team has succeeded in throwing all their cards, the game stops. At this point the two team captains begin by collecting all their team’s cards that have landed around the room, which are discarded as they are worth no points. They then collect all the cards on the newspaper, which are worth one point. The captains should count as they go, moving on to gather cards on the brim (two points) and then in the hat itself (three points). The team with the highest score wins.