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Traditional Games

Traditional games are played throughout the world, by individuals and groups of all ages, with formal or informal rules, and at homes, schools, work, and a variety of community settings. Traditional games are most often learned by observing and participating in a game; teachers are most often a parent or other familiar adult, a sibling, or a friend.

Games play a critical role in fostering and maintaining ethnic and group identity, acquiring physical and intellectual skills, learning cultural knowledge, and developing and negotiating social relationships.

At this year’s Great Lakes Folk Festival, dominoes and the traditional card games of cribbage and buck euchre are featured. More games will be available in the Children’s Folk Arts Festival section of the festival.

Traditional Card Games

A deck of cards and a 15-minute break is all workers at automotive plants, government and university offices, retail businesses, and other work settings need to find relief from their jobs and enjoy social time by playing euchre with their co-workers. At senior citizens centers, veterans halls, recreation centers, and fraternal organizations, people gather to socialize while playing whist, canasta, or skip-bo. At cottages, cabins, fishing and deer camps, friends and relatives while away their leisure time playing hearts, gin rummy, and cribbage.

Traditional card games are important recreational activities that most players learn from friends or relatives. Children begin with easy games such as war, hearts, and go fish. Some games are popular within certain age or social groups, some are more popular in certain regions than others. Many are relatively easy to learn, all require minimal and easily portable equipment, and, except for solitaire, all have a social dimension.

Dominoes

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Cesar Pabon Domino League

Dominoes, sometimes called tiles, are small, flat, rectangular-shaped game pieces. The pieces, which may be made of a variety of materials, are usually one inch wide and two inches long. They are also made half as thick as they are wide so they can stand on one edge without falling over. Like a playing card, a domino has a face and a back. The back is either blank or decorated with a design. The front (or face) of the tile is divided by a line across the center dividing the face into two square halves. Numbers are represented in each half by spots, commonly called pips, or the absence of spots, which represents zero. Generally, dominoes are white with black pips or black with white pips.

A set of dominoes has many similarities to a set of playing cards. Both are called a deck, are shuffled before play, and are used to play many types of games, with even more regional variations. As with other table games, the basic strategy of dominoes can be learned in an afternoon, but the intricacies can take a lifetime to master, and it takes an expert player to win dominoes tournament that are held throughout the country.

Although domino games are played across America in many ethnic and regional communities, it is within Spanish-speaking communities that dominoes is especially popular and played by families, friends, and clubs in homes, community centers, and even in parks. In the Little Havana area of Miami, a park is even called Domino Park.

In 1960, a domino league was established at the United Community Center/Centro de la Communidad Unida (UCC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin by the center’s athletic director, Cesar Pabon. As one member of the Cesar Pabon Domino League commented, “it is appropriate that an athletic director founded the league because dominoes is a sport in Puerto Rico, not just a pastime.” The league, now named after its founder, currently numbers 86 members, all but one of whom is Puerto Rican. They meet at sponsoring bars in south Milwaukee and enjoy traveling to play other leagues at tournaments in the Midwest. Although members of the Cesar Pabon Domino League are familiar with many different domino games, they play one basic game in league activities.

The league’s annual playing season runs from September until the end of March and, at the end of their season, league members celebrate the season’s accomplishments with music, food, and the giving of awards.

Cribbage

Grand Ledge, Michigan; Kingston, New York; and East Lansing, Michigan

Harlan MacDowell, Paul MacDowell, Ian MacDowell, and Chris Luz

Cribbage is a card game for which you need a deck of cards (poker), a cribbage board (to keep score), and at least two people. When two people play, each person is dealt six cards. From those six cards, each person discards two cards to the “crib.” Points are awarded for pairs, runs held in hand, and combinations of cards that add up to fifteen resulting in the common counting chants “15-2, 15-4, 5-6 . . .” When laying down cards points are also awarded but the total cannot exceed 31; the player who comes closest to 31 without going over gets one point. The first person to score 121 points wins.

Cribbage is the card game of choice whenever the extended family of patriarch Harlan MacDowell get together, whether at home or on fishing trips or reunions. Harlan recalls learning the game at an early age from his father, George MacDowell, and grandfather, Clarence MacDowell. George, a woodworker by trade, made several cribbage boards including one table-sized one inherited by his son Forrest. Harlan’s son Doug recalls many times playing cribbage after dinner with his dad while listening to the Tiger baseball games on the radio; they played on one of George’s boards and used toothpicks, matches, and nails for pegs, but never a properly carved cribbage peg. Today, Doug, his brother Paul, and his brother-in-law, Chris Luz, each have several boards, all of them unique and some designed for three players. Together with Hugh MacDowell, Ian MacDowell, Regina Luz, and Conner Luz of the next generation, they carry on this family card tradition.

Buck Euchre

Southwest Minnesota

John Burton

John Burton learned to play Buck Euchre while attending Southwest Minnesota State College (now Southwest State University) in the late 1960s. In this area of southwestern Minnesota, consisting primarily of rural families with German, Swedish, and Norwegian roots, everybody grew up playing this unique variant of Euchre. It is a fun, fast game, with lots of different possible plays, but not so complicated that you can’t spend plenty of time socializing. The play of the cards is similar to Euchre but aspects such as bidding are similar to Hasenpfeffer. Other aspects specific to the game are: (1) each player starts with 36 points and must get down to 0 to win; (2) players must bid to get out of the game; (3) highest bid calls the trump suit; and (4) all the cards (Ace to 9) are used in play. John speculates that the game became so popular in that primarily rural area as it is a good game to play in family situations; there are fewer cards for children to have to hold in their hands.

Since playing cards is a lot more fun than studying, John soon picked up the game. Continuing his education (he didn’t just play cards!) at Michigan State University, John was surprised to learn that no one knew the game. As Mayo Hall’s resident director, John became a goodwill ambassador, enthusiastically teaching the game to the residents. There is now a small but growing multi-generational group of people in Michigan playing this southwestern Minneota variant of Buck Euchre. At the GreatLakes Folk Festival, John will continue passing on the game to others while playing a few hands with his old MSU buddies and their families and catching up on the news, just as he does every time he gets back to Michigan.