In Go Fish you are collecting cards. The aim is to collect complete sets from other players or the pool.
You’re supposed to give up cards if you have them and if other players ask for them. To avoid losing all your cards you need to keep what cards you have secret.
This is a problem if you have too many cards to fit in your hand. Some players will just make a grab for your cards and the game can degenerate into fighting over cards.
Played with a regular 4-suit deck with 13 cards per suit, the aim is to collect the same 4 cards from the 4 suits, called a ‘book’.
There are various rules for asking other players for cards, but generally not asking for all cards from a particular suit?
In the Happy Families version, a book is, eg, the four Mr and Mrs Bone, the Butcher and Master and Miss Bone cards, which form a suit. And the suits are various professions. You ask for suits?
I do it as a matching exercise. A matching A and B card make a book. There are 3 suits representing different vocabulary areas, and in each suit there are 8 pairs of cards, for a total of 48 cards, almost the same as the number in a standard deck, but there is no concept of the same card over the 3 different suits. The aim is to collect pairs. You ask for all the A or B cards in one of the 3 vocabulary areas, which could be 8 at a maximum.
The A card is a word and the B card could be a picture, a translation of the word, or a cloze sentence with a blank where the word could go. Actually, any matching exercise with a large number of items should work.
I like this activity because it frees me from the restricting Elicitation-Response-Evaluation routine, which is like drawing blood from a stone.
See my perl flash card script https://github.com/drbean/ttb/trunk/cards/flash.pl
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