The Ahold Family Game

Card game presumably made as a promotional game for Royal Ahold, a huge conglomerate in the food retail sector and made to celebrate the new Millennium. There are 48 cards, divided into 12 sets of four cards. A number of games using the pack are described. First game: Happy Families: Despite title this is a regular Quartet game. Collect sets and the one with the most when all the cards are collected, wins. Second game: Codebreaker. Problem setter chooses a code, consisting of a regularly recurring pattern of cards; Example: Red, Green, Green, Blue - Red, Green, Green, Blue, and so on. He takes cards that match this pattern and reveals the first card. If no-one guesses the code, he reveals a second one, and so on until someone guesses the code first and wins. Third game: Pairs. Traditional memory game but as there are no duplicate cards in the pack, a player must identify pairs of cards within the same set. Fourth game: Card Race. For two players. A frenetic game of matching cards. Three cards are dealt face up and one face down. The 44 other cards are shared ouzt between both players. At the word "Go", both players start revealing cards with the objective of being able to lay a card on one of the revealed cards. A card that 'goes' must be the same colour or the same letter (A B C or D) or the same geographical name. First to use all their cards on to the three stacks, wins. Fifth game: Beggar-My-Neighbour. The traditional British game. Sixth game: Fortune-Telling. A game and not a Tarot-like prediction system. In their turn, a player turns over a card. The cards are ranked from red A to D, green A to D and blue A to D. The player must 'predict' the next card he turns over as being higher or lower ranked than the revealed card. If he is right, he can try again. If he is wrong, his turn ends and the next player tries. If the card revealed is identically ranked, that ends the player's turn but he does not have to miss a turn. First to turn over all his cards, wins. Seventh game: Tops. This is exactly the same mechanism as traditional Top Trumps. Eight game: Patience. A solo game. Cards are ranked as in the Fortune-Telling, described above. As in traditional Patience games you win if you can sort the cards in order.