SFF Saturday 8-25-2012

This week's submission for Science Fiction Fantasy Saturday is an excerpt from "Dremiks".  I invented a card game for my characters to play and spent a large amount of time figuring out the rules of the game.  This snippet has been modified from the published version of "Dremiks" in order to meet the requirements for SFF Saturdays (10 sentences or less).

Don't forget to check out the other authors' work!

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The four officers were playing spay-ya bushki, a popular card game in university dorms and military barracks all over Earth. The name was a bastardization of the Russian phrase “grandmother’s tears”. The rule set had evolved over the years, and, as was common with every game, each group of players added their own quirks. Played with one hundred four cards from two distinct decks, spay-ya was a bizarre combination of bridge and poker. Each player was initially dealt three cards. They had to bet before looking at those “hole” cards. The bets hovered a foot above the table to each player’s right side, projected by small keycards that recorded wagers and money won or lost.

Swede flipped two cards face up from the top of the deck; these cards became the high and low trumps. Because a spay-ya deck had eight suites, there were several possible designated trump suites and numbers. A skilled player combined card counting, strategic thinking, and a great deal of luck in his game play.