We’ve just finished a game of Uno with the kids. In our family, Uno is treated like a matter of life or death. I’m surprised, when I think about it, that none of our Uno games have ended with knife fights.

You can tell a lot about people by the way they play Uno. Wendy and I typically dedicate each hand to doing everything we can to beat up on one and other. We always sit right beside each other and both of us constantly reverse game play so that we can pound each other with as many “Draw 2” cards and “Draw 4” wild cards as possible. I don’t think either of us cares much about winning, so long as the other ends up holding fifty cards at the end of a hand. I think it's fair to say that both Wendy and I will do things that damage his or her own of winning, so long as it causes the other person to lose and lose badly. I'll hold a "Draw 4" forever, if possible, in order to make sure that I'm playing to her when I play it. To Wendy's credit, and to mine, too, neither of us cheat. I think that should be expected, of course... I just want to make it clear that neither of us is willing to compromise the integrity of the game in order to hammer the other one. Knife fights might be a possibility, but cheating is not.

Each of the kids, however, has a distinctly different approach to Uno.

Hailey: The Performance Artist
For Hailey, the rules of Uno seem to be more of a suggestion than a rigid system. Not only will he occasionally, for instance, try to play a red one on a blue seven… but he’ll actually announce his intentions. “I’m going to play a red one,” he’ll say. We’ll remind him that he can’t do that, and he’ll say “Oh, man!” It isn't that he's bummed because we didn't let him break the rules... I think he just hates it that none of us understand the bold artistic expression he was trying to make.

Willow: The Exhibitionist
Willow likes to sit throughout the game and announce what’s in her hand. “Oh, all I’ve got is yellow,” she’ll say. Or “I can’t wait to play this draw four wild card!” Somehow, in spite of this, she manages to win quite a few hands. Maybe it’s some kind of reverse psychology trick.

Liam: The Card Shark
Even though he’s the youngest at six years old, and even though he never organizes his cards, but instead sits with a jumble of cards in both fists, Liam wins more hands than any of us. And, he’s very competitive about it all. He will make a good poker player someday, because he can read a competitor’s face like nobody’s business. Today, for instance, when I was playing to him, he could tell that I was about to play a “Draw 2” card. Even before I could fish the card out of my hand, he got this squinty expression of disdain, looked at me and said “Butthole.” We all got a good laugh out of that. I didn’t get mad, either. That’s the way Uno is played in this family. Hey, if he played a “Draw 2” to me, I’d have called him a butthole, too.

Uno is a lot of fun… it’s one of those eternal family games that never gets old. So far, every game we’ve played has ended with no reported internal bleeding, too.