#leaf game

A few centuries before the creation of the jiaozi and money-suited playing cards, the same woodblock printing methods had also been used to make folded leaflet rulebooks for a fairly complex Chinese tables game that was called yezi xi, the "Leaf Game". Confusingly for historians, this exact same term is used to refer to the early card games played with the new money-suited cards after 1000 CE, with the word "leaf" referring to the paper cards rather of the pages of the leaflet reference. Sadly, we don't know much about either game's rules except that the tables game was probably a precursor of Shengguantu (the Promotion Chart), and the card game was probably a precursor of Madiao ("Horse Passant", meaning a horse with one hoof raised up, which had a colloquial meaning of "three against one" in the same manner as the English phrase "king of the hill"). Madiao itself has both an elaborate history and elaborate rules, so it seems reasonable to infer that yezi xi was much simpler – making it probably the world's first trick-taking game, and maybe even the world's first hand comparison game.

The team played last night.

Kind of a big game.

We have been on a costly slide, where winning even one or two of the five or six we've lost couldve cemented our position in the standings. Now as we slip, our fate becomes less and less our own.

With every loss, we turn to obsessive 'enemy watching'... always looking behind us to see who's catching up. This is the time, when seasons can turn on a dime and the teams you thought were cockroaches in the the first half, suddenly find their second wind. Or when teams with such high hopes,  suddenly can't put together a string of wins to save their season...

So back to last night.

The team came out strong, they used their speed, they created chances... but went down on a nasty goal. Then another ugly one. The home crowd drew in a collective breath, fearing the worst.

But a bounceback goal put them back in the game, and another beauty tied it up. Back to square one... until another goal for the other side put them one down heading to the 3rd.

It was a grinding, exhausting period... where every inch of the ice was fought for, and the other team started playing the trap to pure frustration.

In the dying last minute, the teams hotshots were put on the ice for one final drive. The trap that had been working so well in the last half of the game, let one pass squeak through, and the veteran goaltender finally let a rebound escape his grasp. The hottest player on the team, the one who is always in the right place at the right time, nets the tying goal with seconds on the clock!

I swear I could feel the energy and hear the celebration from my condo in the sky.

What a character period. What a sigh of redemption. What an uproar from the nervous clock-watching crowd.

Into overtime.

and like that... a million hearts break. A weak little shot, going well wide of the net is directed in by the oft shaky and unreliable goaltender.

Game over.

Unceremoniously, and unpoetically.

It's not the final blow, it's not the hinging game... but every game from now until the season ends means more than the last. They know that right?

How this team responds and rebounds will be the true and perhaps final test of a team that has been trying to prove itself all season.