Daily Dose of English 58
Card Games
Daily Dose of English 58
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about card games. Card games. Games that you play with cards. Because card games have been a part of my life for a very long time. And I figured that it would make a bit of an interesting episode. And I specifically chose to separate card games from board games, because we're probably going to talk about board games in the future. I don't think we've talked about it yet, right? Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah. So we're going to talk about card games today. Card games are really any game that are played mostly or completely with cards. Some card games use other things such as dice or maybe some extra little tokens or whatever, or maybe some other way to count things, but they're still card games since they primarily use cards. And there's generally two different types of card games. There's the standard card game, which uses just a regular 52-card deck of cards, or there's a, I guess, a unique card game, a card game that has their own cards to use. A lot of other board games have cards in them, but aren't necessarily card games. For example, a pretty popular board game is called Settlers of Catan, or you might have heard of Ticket to Ride. Both are great games, by the way. And they both have cards in them, but they're not card games. Card games are games that, like I said, are almost completely played with cards, and that is the whole purpose of them. Probably the most famous card game is poker. Poker is a card game because you play with cards. However, in a lot of ways, it's a bit more of a betting game since that is, in some ways, more important to the game, but the game is primarily played with cards. That's a standard card game with a standard deck of cards. Another really famous card game is Uno. That game has become very popular all over the world. And Uno is also a card game because there's only cards. You just have the different numbers and colors of the cards with a couple of special ones in there. And that is also a card game. Card games are really good. And I'm not gonna say they're not necessarily always fun. A lot of card games are fun. But card games are nice and they're good because they're pretty portable. Portable is something that you can bring with you and take with you. So something like a fridge is not portable. You can't bring a fridge with you easily around the city or to another place. But a deck of cards is very easy to carry. Cards very frequently take up no, like barely any space in a bag. And so you can just throw some cards into a bag and have a lot of different ways, a lot of different things to play. Or you can bring a special set of cards if you like a specific game or whatever. And so there's a lot of value to card games because they are pretty portable, which is quite nice. In fact, I've seen a lot of card game versions of other games. to make them portable. So, for example, going to my Settlers of Catan, what I just said earlier, which is a good game, like I said, but there's also a two-player card game version, which is good for travel and for playing with one other person when you're on vacation or waiting at a restaurant or something like that. There are hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of different card games because they're also really versatile. Versatile means that something can be used in a lot of different ways. So cards can be used to hide information, they can be used to a plan thing. There's so many different ways to use just a simple card that they're really, really versatile. You can have card games that are about throwing the cards. You can have card games that are about picking up more cards, that are about matching cards, combining cards. There's so many different ways to do it. And you can print anything onto a card. And this actually is going to get into the card game that is most important in my life, which is called Magic the Gathering, which you may have heard of, may have heard of. It's the largest trading card game in the world in terms of number of players, and there's a ton of people all over the world who play this game. And it is a trading card game, which means that there are thousands of different cards. In fact, there are actually over 30,000 unique individual cards that do different things within this game. It's quite complicated if you're just starting to learn, but it is possible to learn, obviously. Many people have learned it and can play it. But it is quite complicated at the beginning. There's a lot of math involved, a lot of knowing of cards. And at a certain point, you also have to be familiar with the history in order to understand some of these cards. which is pretty overwhelming for a lot of new players because it's so much information, but at the same time, that's what makes the game so interesting. There are tens of thousands of different cards that you can play and know about, and understanding a bit of that history makes it more interesting. However, almost never are all 30,000 cards available for play. A lot of people usually will choose a specific, what's called format, where it restricts the cards to being a couple thousand options, which is still a lot of options. A thousand cards is a lot to choose from, but that's what makes a trading card game kind of, I guess, different and interesting from a game like poker, where there's only 52 cards and there can't be more, there can't be less. That's just how poker works. A lot of other games sort of split it down the middle, or they meet it halfway, which is a phrase to say that they're not as simple as just 52 cards, but they're not as complicated as 30,000 with tons of different rules and decades of history. For example, another game that I really, really like, a card game, is called Dominion. Dominion is a card game where you have to build a deck. So you collect cards throughout the game by buying them and you build your deck of cards. And in each game, there's only 10 unique cards in the middle, plus there's like, I don't know, another 10 different cards that are part of the base of every single game that you play. And so it's a lot more straightforward and simple to play, but it's still really, really fun, and you can change things out. So every couple years, right, they release a new version that has new interesting cards, new mechanics, so that you can play the same base game. It's the same idea, but with different cards. And that's another really cool thing about cards is that you can add new ones or remove them very easily. A board game, you'd have to reprint the entire board, getting new pieces is difficult, but cards are just cards. They're pretty cheap and inexpensive. You can even print your own playing cards or own cards on a site like makeplayingcards.com. Not a sponsor or ad or anything. I've used that service before to print things, and you can print anything onto a card, and it's pretty, and it's sort of fun. And in this last little bit of time, I wanna talk about something that's a little bit interesting because, and it talks about, or not talks about, it sort of shows how versatile and unique and interesting cards and card games can be. Because in the last couple of years, we've started to create digital card games. Like online, on video games, there are games that are just completely made of cards. Which is sort of weird because a video game can be literally anything. You can create monsters and cities and whatever. but still there's a lot of card games out there that are video games, which I think is really cool because it shows that this thing, cards, it goes beyond physicalness, right? Cards are simple, they're basic, but that's actually a strength of theirs. That's a good thing. Cards are cool because they're so simple. And so video games that can do literally anything still copy that. There's a lot of successful card games online. I think one of the most famous ones is called Hearthstone, which is similar to Magic. However, it's a lot simpler. And the cards don't really look like cards. They look physically different, but they function exactly like cards, except for they can do things that you can't do with physical cards. You can change things, you can update them, or you can draw stuff all over them that you couldn't physically do in real life. And that's a cool, what we call design space to explore. Design space is when you can create something or design something in a new way, right? So this design space has been opened up because designers and game creators can now take cards and do things that are physically impossible, like for example, duplicating a card. You can do that on computers and that opens up this design space that we can't do in physical life. Anyways, I've been talking about card games now for almost 11 minutes, which is enough for this episode. And so I'm going to end it here. And thank you so much for listening to this episode because you're awesome. And I hope to see you again tomorrow for the next one. Have a good one. Bye bye.
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