Why I teach it to early elementary school students:
This is a logical game that is easy to learn and teach. Children will pick it up quickly and be able to play independently with each other and teach it to others if they are interested.
What you need:
Any deck of playing cards will do, even if a couple are missing
Setup:
The dealer passes out 10 face down cards to all players. Players will arrange their cards in two rows of five, keeping all cards face down. Going from left to right and starting in the top row, each card marks the place where a new card will go in a low to high order from ace (the low card in this game) to 10.
Game play:
After each player has ten cards, the dealer will make two piles in the middle, flipping the top card from the deck face up to start the second, discard pile. A player always starts his or her turn by selecting either the top discard card or the top face down card from the deck. The player places the new card face up in the correct spot in his or her rows of cards, picking up the card serving as the placeholder for that spot. Then the player figures out where to put that card, continuing until finding a card that is unusable, which goes in the discard pile, ending the turn.
Unusable cards are either duplicates of a card the player already has facing up in the correct spot or Kings/ Queens, which have no value in this game.
Wild cards: Jacks are wild in this game. They are special because they can substitute in any spot from ace to 10. Also, if a player finds the actual card to put in a space where he or she has a Jack, the player can move the Jack to fill in somewhere else.
Ending a round: The first player to find a card for each of the ten spaces in the ace to ten sequence wins a round. After winning a round, the player will be dealt one fewer card in the next round. The player who wins the first round, for example, will only have to find cards from ace to 9 in the second round and will not have a face down card to mark the spot for tens. The game ends at players’ discretion or when someone gets down to one card and finds an ace or Jack to fill the spot in that round.
Activity by Robbie Hartery, Sprague Site