alley games

Kids enjoy card games that are laugh-out-loud fun and fast-paced. The rules should be easy to understand and the kids should feel like they have a good handle on gameplay. Kids may not like to admit it, stacking games but educational card games can bring a lot of enjoyment, and they'll get the bonus of learning something while playing the game. Kids are looking to have a good time when playing a card game, so they game must be exciting and just challenging enough to keep them hooked. We turned to a new strategy: counting cards to determine which ones are more likely to show up. It would be nice to be able to keep track of all 13 values, but that was too hard, so we just focused on the first five values. We would start out by guessing 2s, and each time we saw any card valued 2–6, we would mentally take note that we’d seen it. After correctly guessing a 2, we’d change our guess to whichever card we’d seen the fewest number of times. Ties would be resolved arbitrarily — in our case, we always chose the card with the lower value.