The Air at the Top of the Bottle

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Children’s Card Games (188)

December 20th, 2012 · 3 Comments

There have been other card games that adapt non-card games: baseball or bowling, to name two.  This 1959 offering from Russell, “Tail the Donkey,” reworks the old party favorite.  Players compete to collect a complete donkey — in a specific order, to make it trickier.  No blindfolds or sharp objects are required.  The design on the back is a deft one, I think.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Tags: Card Games · Ephemera

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Win // Dec 21, 2012 at 1:27 am

    Magnificent! I think this is my favorite of all the card games/art you’ve posted here, Doug.

  • 2 Win // Dec 21, 2012 at 1:51 am

    Being currently unsupervised in charge of an online connection, I couldn’t resist the temptation to search for the origins and meaning of pinning the tail on the donkey. Not much luck there, but I did come across a Japanese analogue called Fuku Warai, in which, instead of the outline of a donkey, the outline of a chubby face is laid out and blindfolded players invited to place facial features wherever they guess they belong. Digital versions of Fuku Warai can now be downloaded for time-wasting on iPhones. I suppose the old surrealist favorite, Exquisite Corpse, belongs in the same category of blind conjecture. I wonder if anyone ever attempted to turn that one into a card game…?

  • 3 Doug // Dec 21, 2012 at 12:14 pm

    I’m glad you enjoy the donkey. The closest I know to an Exquisite Corpse card game is “Five Card Nancy”: popular, I hear, among cartoonists. Players compete to assemble a narrative from panels taken from Bushmiller’s “Nancy.”