All I can say is Ryan is hilarious when you stick him with a Draw 4 Wild Card, and Andrew can’t stand on his own two feet when he’s laughing. Not that he was the only one cracking up. By the time we were through with the Best Game of Uno Ever, we had washboard abs and tears in our eyes. It’s a bummer that Ben missed the whole thing, but it was good for the rest of us, because it gave us an excellent opportunity to pull a prank on him (which Annie and I have been itching to do for weeks).
We decided to “modify” Benjamin’s room in ten different ways, then wait for him to figure them all out.
Some were easy, like finding his computer screen cobwebbed with minty dental floss. Mmmm. Some were hard, like how we switched his two identical gigantic rubbermaid containers so that the bottom one was on the top.
I had to tell him where his computer mouse was, because it was in his bed (which Andrew short-sheeted) and he needed to use it. Ben, did you ever figure out the rest of ’em?
Anyway, back to the Best Game of Uno Ever.
We decided for our second round (Ryan had just joined us at this point) that we would change the rules a bit to make things more interesting. So instead of the normal rules, which tell you (with good reason, as we found out) that you do not get to lay a card after receiving a Draw 2 or Draw 4, instead of those rules, we decided to say what the heck, go ahead and play after you’ve drawn your four cards or two cards or whatever. We figured it would be easier to get rid of cards that way.
We were dead wrong.
After I amassed a hand whose contents were approximately half the entire Uno deck, and after Andrew had reshuffled the discard pile approximately eleven times (since we kept running out of cards), Ryan had to leave to pick up a bookshelf from the Gannaways (thanks, Trent, for the use of your truck, by the way). We took a break. Ryan came back, and we continued to play.
Thanks to the break, things were back in perspective, and we realized that this game was going to be a perpetual one unless we changed the rules back. That’s right. If you let the victim of a Draw 2 or Draw 4 put down one of his or her cards, you will be playing Uno for all eternity.
In our case, it was only a few hours. We realized our grave error. We were lucky.
In the nick of time, we retracted the rule modification, only to realize we had become so completely addicted to the game that when one of us won (was it Andrew?) we wanted nothing more than to continue playing.
So it became a three-player game. Annie won the second round (although Ryan and I did our best to gang up on her with reverse and skip cards).
And then there were two. Ryan and I faced off for another agonizing bout, while Annie and Andrew cheered us on. Ryan was being downright sassy, so I called Uno on him just as he lay his LAST card down – then I played the final card in my hand. I had won a hairbreadth’s victory.
I think it was a little dirty, though, so I’m willing to share the title. And the laughter.