Spoons

Objective
To get four of a kind and take a spoon. Once one spoon is taken, everybody attempts to get the remaining spoons.
Play
From 3 to 8 players use a deck of 52 ordinary playing cards and a number of spoons totaling one fewer than the number of players. The spoons are placed in the center of the table with handles pointing outward so that they may be easily grabbed by any of the players. One person is designated first dealer and deals four cards to each player. Remaining cards are placed in a pile in front of the dealer to form the draw pile. The person to the left of the dealer is known as the trash can. Deal passes to the right each round, so that one round’s dealer becomes the next round’s trash can. Dealer starts the round by drawing a card from the draw pile and adding it in his hand so that he now has five cards. Dealer chooses one of these cards and discards it, passing it face down to the player at his right. That player will pick up the single card discarded by the dealer and discard one card to the player at his right, while dealer draws a new card from the draw pile and discards another card to his right. Gameplay continues thusly with cards being picked up, discarded, and passed counterclockwise around the table until a card is passed to the trash player. The trash picks up the card passed by the player at his left, but discards it to a discard pile instead of to the dealer. If the draw pile is depleted, the trash shuffles the discard pile and passes it to the dealer who uses it as the new draw pile.Each player is trying to make their four cards into a set of four of a kind (four queens, four twos, etc.) by drawing new cards and discarding unused ones. A player should keep the four cards that are most likely to produce a matching set. No player may have more than 5 cards or fewer than 4 cards at any given moment.As soon as any player has a set of four cards and has discarded to the player on her right, he or she is allowed to take a spoon from the pile in the middle of the table. As soon as any player grabs a spoon from the pile of spoons, any other player is allowed to take a spoon as well. This usually causes a mad grab for spoons leaving one player empty handed. The player who ends the round without a spoon loses that round, and is eliminated. When only two players remain, the first person to get four of a kind is declared the winner. A player losing a round for the first time earns the letter, then at the next loss the letter P, and so on gradually spelling out “S-P-O-O-N-S”. When a player has accumulated all six letters in “spoons”, they drop out of the game. At that time, the number of spoons used in game play is reduced by one. The game continues until only one person remains. That person is the winner.