Playing the Game

On a lazy Saturday afternoon during vacation, we were sitting around playing a game called Skip-Bo. The object of the game (in order to win, of course) was to get rid of the 30 cards in your stack. The strategy in winning was to not play cards that would allow another player to play a card off their stack.

During the fifth (I think, I kinda lost tract) game I had a thought come to me about changing the intention of the game. As this idea developed it became more and more uncomfortable to play the way I had been playing, which was basically a cut-throat strategy.

So, for the next game, I presented this idea: The intention of the game is to play in such a way as to help everyone else to win. You still had to follow the rules, and you absolutely had to play the card at the top of your stack if it could be played. I called it taking care of yourself.

One of us became quite disturbed at first, not because she didn't want to play with that intention, but because she no longer knew how to play. Changing the intention changed the strategy, and she had the strategy on how to win the game the way it was played before down pat. There were no rules for the new intention; the rules of the game remained the same.

There was a little confusion as we focused on playing the cards in a way that best served the other players. The old strategy had to go out the window! Where the focus had been on the "most important card" being the one on top your stack and playing all the cards possible to get that card off the top of the stack, that stack now actually became a nuisance. That card sometimes blocked another player's chance to play their card, which blocked them from winning.

Some gambling was attempted as well. Do I play all the cards in my hand so I can get another five cards that may help the other players win, even if playing all the cards in my hand blocked someone else's play? This consideration was played out in different ways by the different players. No judgment, just see what happens.

The game took at least twice as long as the previous games. An interesting result was that at the end, everyone had just a couple cards left in their stack. Playing the old way, the remaining stack counts would often be very unbalanced - one player may actually have most their cards left!

Once the confusion was gone, once everyone let go of how to do it right, the feel of the game was awesome! It felt good, really good.

So, how can we apply this new intention to other games? Well, maybe some of you already play this way, so it's not so new. How can we apply this intention to the game of life? What are the rules and how do we do it right? It really doesn't matter about the rules or doing it right. What became obvious in the new-and-improved Skip-Bo game was that if you held the intention for everyone to win, you knew what to do.

When everyone wins, well EVERYONE wins! When we help everyone be successful, it just makes sense (well, now it's much clearer to me - gotta love visuals!) that we, too, achieve success. We Are One, after all, don'tcha know:)

Are you ready to play a new game, use a new strategy? Just imagine if we were all out to help everyone else win - what a game of life that would be! I wanna play! I wanna play!

Happy Holidays to everyone! Come on over - we'll play some cards!