For each State, there is one card in the deck for the Capital, and one card for the State itself. The objective of the game is to match the cards into pairs, and then lay them down. The play has a very strong resemblance to playing "go fish". If you didn't know what the names of the State Capitols were before you played this game, you would be at something of a disadvantage. After playing a few times, you would have no trouble passing a geography quiz.

The cards are arranged so that each quarter of the deck (East, Midwest, West, South) has a quarter of the cards in it. You can see by the different sizes of the orange blobs that there was a general trend towards bigger states as the country grew towards the west. Sometimes I wonder why that is.

Thanksgiving meal I had a discussion with my father about the tradeoffs between learning the States and Capitals from card games (sustainable technology) or videogames (the kind of thing he keeps wanting me to make so corporate America can exploit me again). We ended up agreeing that if you played the game once online and once offline, you were more likely to remember them than if you did either by itself. We also agreed that the different delivery methods would add entertainment value that generic repetitions wouldn't have.

I call this the house that Grace built. While she was building it, I spent some time taking pictures of her sister and my sister working in the kitchen.

This picture of my sister's elder daugther is from that batch. My brother in law saw all the zooming and aiming and focusing I had to do to get the shots I wanted, and said "It's like you are playing a videogame." I answered that I was playing a videogame. I still think that getting a good picture without hurting anyone is a better way of scoring points than killing digital foes. It is something of a challenge when you add in the fact that I don't really want people going to go out of their ways for me. I'm after the best found art nothing can buy.