We just got back from our biennial family trip to Virginia. Every other year we spend about a week at my aunt’s vacation house. It’s primarily a time when we try our best to do as little as possible — in my mind, the very definition of vacation. We wake up, we eat, we sit around and talk, we swim in the river. Oh, then we eat again. Sit around again. Then eat again.

But when we’re not engaged in any of those intense activities, it’s a fair bet that we’re playing games. Some old family favorites include Bananagrams, Hit or Miss, Balderdash. We brought along two new games this time: a dice game called Toss Up and another game called Things.

But when we’re not engaged in any of those, it’s a fair bet we’re playing cards. Sometimes the card games we play are real ones and sometimes we (literally) make them up as we go along.

Back during our 2005 trip, we did just that. We began by dealing out hands to players and then as we went around the circle, we simply created rules on the fly. At one point during one of these rounds I had the thought: what if at some point you had to just give your hand to someone else? Like, let’s say all your hand-building and scheming and strategizing just went out the window the moment the game forced you to pass your awesome hand to the person on your left and take the crappy hand from the person on your right?

Long story short, we spent hours and hours playing, fine-tuning, and — dare I say — perfecting this game. We had more fun developing it and playing it than any other game in a long time. We even came up with a good name for it: given the fact that building a hand to harm others could suddenly be used against you, we called it Kardma.

Want to play it?

Well, so do we. I tried to write down the rules as we went — full knowing that none of us would remember them. But the development of the game was too fast and too furious and I couldn’t (or didn’t) keep up. Worse, the paper I used to scribble down the half-rules went missing for over two years. But then one day, while cleaning, I found it. And in 2009, we tried to resurrect it. Alas, the magic was gone. I guess there was something about that original moment four years earlier that we couldn’t — and might never — reproduce.

But that didn’t stop us from trying something new this year. But for that story, check out the next post.