The Game Is Animal — Hold on for Gut Busting Laughter

This game deserves it’s own PixieTip. We can’t recommend it enough. I don’t know how old you have to be able to play it, but probably 4 or 5. There is absolutely no age limit. And I have never laughed harder or longer than when playing this game with my family. Frankly, these are some of the best memories of my life. The man you see in the photo is my beloved Uncle Tom. Queen Fairy’s (a.k.a my mom’s) baby brother. He’s definitely got some pixie in him that’s for sure. But I point him out because he has an excellent poker face and he was the King of the Animal world.

How do you play? You need a bunch of people. The more the better, but you could probably get away with four or five. Then you need a deck of cards. If it’s a really big group, you might want to bust out another deck. First everyone needs to pick an animal name for themselves. Uncle Tom would always pick Emu. (Kelly thinks it was Uncle Jay — our mom’s older brother — but memories are such tricky things). What’s an Emu you ask? I had literally no idea until last year when my kids had a book of Australian animals. It’s an Australian bird. So. He has a very distinctive voice and when he would tell us his animal name he’d have is poker face on and very quietly string out the word almost melodically, “Eeee-mooo.” Well I’m sure you had to be there, but you can see his poker face in the photo and after he said Emu we’d all be giggling. And the mood was set.

So everyone goes around the table saying and repeating their animal names until everyone feels comfortable that they know everybody’s names. Then or during the animal picking part you deal out all the cards. You don’t look at them. Just put them down in a stack in front of you. When the dealer says “Go” you flip over one of the cards and see if someone else is matching you. Like say you have an Ace and Uncle Tom has an Ace, you’ve go to say “Emu” before he can say “Dog.”  And let me tell you, for a short name, Emu is ridiculously easy to forget. THAT, ladies and gentleman is why he is The King of Animal.

The object of the game is to get rid of all your cards. So if Uncle Tom says “Dog” before you say “Emu” then you get all the cards he’s laid out in front of him. If no one has a match you keep taking the top card from your stack and putting it down in front of you when the dealer says go.

If you’ve got multiple matches — say Kelly has an Ace, you have an Ace and Uncle Tom has an Ace — then it might go down like this. Kelly screams out Emu, Uncle Tom Screams out Dog and then you see that you’re matching with Kelly and scream out Rhinoceros. So in that one Uncle Tom gets Kelly’s discards, You get Uncle Tom’s and Kelly gets yours. If you were quicker on the draw you might have been able to yell out both Rhinoceros and Emu and you would have gotten rid of all of your cards, I guess evenly between them, but really it would go to Kelly if she didn’t say Emu in time and vice versa for Uncle Tom.