Jonathan and I have created a new card game. It's called Find Your Family. I'll explain the rules here so you all can have a chance to experience the coolness.

For 2-4 players

The goal: to be the first to get the Jack, Queen, King and Ace of a certain suit--your "family"

The setup: Shuffle two decks together (it's very important that you use at least two decks...we haven't experimented with this completely yet, but we think it might be best to have the same number of decks as there are people playing). Now pick out four cards, one of each suit, and mix them around face down. Each person takes one, without showing it to any other players, to find out what his "family" suit will be. All four cards are shuffled back into the deck. Deal each player four cards. The top card of the deck is turned over to begin the discard pile.

Playing: Player left of the dealer goes first. With each turn, the player must take one card (either from the pile, or from the top of the discard pile) and discard one. Play continues until one player has all four face cards of his "family" suit. At that point, I think it would be cute if he has to say "Family Reunion!" to let the other players know he's found them all, but Jonathan thinks it's sufficient to say, "Yay!" or "I won!" You must decide this for yourself.

Variation: You can also play Find Your Extended Family, where you have to find all the cards of a certain suit except the face cards. It plays the same, but you use nine cards in your hand.

The history of the game: Find Your Family evolved from a game we made up early last semester called Find Your Mom, where you only had to find the Queen of a given suit. That game is much shorter. Plus, we played it with only one deck, so we pretty easily figured out whose Mom was whose. And then it ended with both of us holding onto the other's Mom, refusing to discard. It became clear that we would need to make some changes. Hence, the above game rules.

There you have it. Now, go. Find your family.