The Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan [27]
Knocking is when a player ends the round, and is signaled by a player literally making a knocking sound on the table. A player can only knock if she has 10 points of deadwood or less. If you have 0 points of deadwood, also known as “going gin,” you must knock. Otherwise, you don’t have to knock unless you want to—even if you have 10 points in deadwood or less, you can keep playing to try for gin or for a lower point count.
When you decide to knock, rap once on the table, lay down your cards face up, and add up your deadwood. The other player then lays down her hand and separates her deadwood from her melds. If she has any deadwood that can be incorporated into your melds, she can “layoff”—that is, give them to you for your meld so they cannot be counted as her deadwood. After that, add up her total remaining deadwood. Subtract your deadwood from the other player’s deadwood, and the answer you get is your score for this hand.
If you have 0 points of deadwood, you must knock and call “gin.” You get a 25-point bonus for gin, on top of the points for the other player’s deadwood (which she cannot layoff in this case).
If you knock and it turns out the other player has less deadwood than you, you get no points—but the other player scores not only the total of your deadwood minus hers, but 25 bonus points as well. That is called “undercutting.”
After the cards have been counted and points totaled, gather up the cards, shuffle, and deal the next hand.
Keep playing until one of the players reaches 100 points. Each player receives 25 points for each hand she won, and the player who reached 100 points first gets an extra 100-point bonus. The winner is the player with the most points after all the bonuses have been added.
South Sea Islands
THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDS are rich with history, lore, and fantastical beauty, and are a tropical adventure paradise.
One famous visitor to these remote islands was Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim’s Daughter Longstocking, otherwise known as Pippi, the spunky fictional heroine of the Pippi Longstocking books. In one adventure, red-haired Pippi’s pirate father, the swashbuckling Efraim Longstocking, capsizes his boat, The Hoptoad, on a South Sea Isle (the fictional Kurrekurredutt). The locals pronounce him their leader, calling him Fat White Chief. And when Pippi comes to visit with her friends from Sweden, they call her Princess Pippilotta.
Well, that was the 1940s. It has gone out of fashion to barge onto native islands like that, expecting to become the princess and chief, in fiction or in reality. Today, were you to land on a South Sea Island (whether because your own pirate ship takes water in the Pacific, or because the tunnel you were digging from your backyard to China went slightly askew), here are some contemporary and historical details you’ll want to know.
FASCINATING FACTS
The South Sea Islands are part of the geographical area called Oceania. This includes more then 10,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean. Some are mere specks of rock in the ocean. Others, like Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand, are large and well known. The islands are divided into four groups: Australasia, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.
Many of the islands are coral reefs—with villages built on the delicate skeletons of live coral. Some formed from the once-hot lava of underwater volcanoes, which eventually rose to the water’s surface.
Additional islands are atolls—that’s a narrow circle of land surrounded by ocean, with a lagoon in the middle. Atolls are the result of coral that has grown on top of a volcanic island that over the years and, with changing water levels, has sunk back into the sea. Still others are archipelagos, long chains of islands scattered over an expanse of water.
A good number of the islands are actually territories of far-away nations like the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. A few,