English for Activists

I had a great time playing Daihinmin tonight with the participants of the Tokyo EFA class. What a great game. Of course, when I got home I googled it and found a write up on Wikipedia.

"Daifugō/Daihinmin (大富豪/大貧民; in English, Very Rich Man, Very Poor Man) is a Japanese card game for three or more players played with a standard 52-card pack. The objective of the game is to be the first person to get rid of all your cards by playing progressively stronger cards than the previous player. Each round, the previous round's winner will be the daifugō (or rich man) and will earn various advantages. The last person to get rid of all his cards is the daihinmin (poor man). Winners of the previous round will be at an advantage by being able to take one or more cards from losers.

"The game is very similar to the Chinese climbing card games Big Two and Zheng Shangyou, to the Vietnamese game Tien Len, and distantly related to Western card games like President, (also known as Capitalism and Asshole), and The Great Dalmuti. Like those other games, there are many variations and rules...."

If you read on, you will see that in US and European verions the game has had racist and sexist variants in addition to versions that treat the "lower" classes as stupid and dirty...

I hope to spread the Japanese version of the game with my friends in the US...

The deck of cards we used tonight was the Jeu de Marseille, designed by a group of Surrealist artists.