[The posts for this month are reposts from the site www.honotogroabemo.org, on which a host of hirsute individuals including yours truly would grow beards to raise money for breast cancer research. The site is defunct, but I thought I’d resurrect the game-related posts. This was originally posted on 2011-11-29.]

(Look at my shirt, my shirt is amazing.)

First up, thanks so much to those who donated today. I’ve added an additional $95 to my total, and the anti-cancer forces greatly appreciate it. To celebrate, I’ve decided that my shirt needed a little more panache. Unfortunately, I’m out of white plumes, so I made a different sort of alteration.

Yesterday’s clue should have been obvious to the hard liquor connoisseur, but in case you didn’t get it, it was Gin Rummy. Gin Rummy appears to be one of the few commonly played card games that actually has a designer associated with it, namely Elwood T. Baker. Though Wikipedia names the date of design as 1909, other sites are more vague — and in fact it’s not entirely clear that he was the designer — but true or not his name is the one associated with it. Gin Rummy appears to be a derivative of a game called Whiskey Poker, and at one point may have been called Gin Poker, before Baker’s son gave it the name Gin Rummy. It, like many another card game, was certainly created in a gambling hall, and eventually became the backstage game to play among the Hollywood elite.

But games with making melds have been around much longer than 1909. The oldest is probably Mahjong, which is not a solitaire game that bored officeworkers play, but a tile/card game that bored Jewish ladies play (though I’m fairly certain bored Chinese men and ladies played it first). Fans of Drunken Master II will appreciate the enthusiasm that some people have for the game of Mahjong.